Samuel L. Jackson interview

Playboy South Africa interviews Samuel L. Jackson


PLAYBOY: Do you think Lee has substantive issues with Tarantino and his movies?

JACKSON: Spike saying “I’m not going to see Django because it’s an insult to my ancestors”? It’s fine if you think that, but then you have nothing else to say about the movie, period, because you don’t know if Quentin insulted your ancestors or not. On the other hand, Louis Farrakhan, who these blackest of black people say speaks the truth and expresses the vitriol of the angry black man, can look at the movie and go, “Goddamn, that’s a great fucking movie. Quentin Tarantino told the truth.” Dick Gregory’s seen the movie 12 fucking times. I respect what they have to say more than anybody else, because they’ve been through it. They walked the walk with Dr King. Some of the bullshit criticisms about Django come from people who don’t understand the genre and who didn’t live through that era. They think they need to wave a flag of blackness that they don’t necessarily have the credentials to wave.



PLAYBOY: Do you have other specific people in mind when you say “these blackest of black people”?

JACKSON: W Kamau Bell’s FX show [Totally Biased With W Kamau Bell] had this whole segment where he was criticizing Django. He’s a young black man with nappy hair and very dark skin, but he also has a very white wife and an interracial child. You can’t tell me you know what people in the South did if you never spent time down there. He can say there had to be words Quentin could use other than nigger. Well, what are they? These 20-somethings can’t turn around and tell me the word nigger is fucked-up in  Django yet still listen to Jay Z or whoever else say “nigger, nigger, nigger” throughout the music they listen to. “Oh, that’s okay because that’s dope, that’s down, we all right with that.” Bullshit. You can’t have it one way and not the other. It’s art – you can’t not censor one thing and try to censor the other. Saying Tarantino said “nigger” too many times is like complaining they said “kike” too many times in a movie about Nazis.

South African Playmate

Playboy South Africa

It is not the norm to feature African women in the elegant style of Playboy. It is mostly the playground for the white women. Their appeal sales the concept, and the color is the color. Like any man Playboy has been an influence upon my thinking and a challenge to my beliefs. Playboy's founder, Hugh Hefner has reshaped women's freedoms, influenced the Civil Rights movement, and changed people's relationship with themselves, sex, and the human body. The writing staff is exceptional. The magazine's enormous impact upon American and global thought came by way of the interviews they published over the decades of people important to the social changes of the world.

I am reading the Playboy interview of actor, Samuel L. Jackson, now. It is eye opening. Jackson is as I thought: a profound man. Check this interview out: http://www.playboy.co.za/samuel-l-jackson/

- Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 11.18.13

Samuel L. Jackson, actor

PLAYBOY: Living in a segregated environment, what were some other useful survival tools your family gave you?
JACKSON: There were certain things you necessarily had to be told as a child – things that would keep you alive and out of harm’s way. My family would point out this or that person as a Klansman or a grand wizard and tell me who specifically those men had killed and gotten away with it just because they’d said that black person was doing this or that. You could not look suspicious, because when people can accuse you of anything, there’s nothing you can say. They’d tell me not to get in a car with this or that policeman, saying, “I don’t care what happens, you run and run till you get here, and then we’ll deal with it here.”

PLAYBOY: Did movie-going influence your eventual decision to become an actor?
JACKSON: Before we even had a television, I listened to a lot of radio drama as a kid, hearing how people’s voices can tell stories. Every Saturday I spent all day in one of Chattanooga’s two black theaters, the Liberty and the Grand, seeing Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Lash LaRue, Westerns, Creature From  the Black Lagoon, Francis the Talking Mule.  Books had more to offer than movies. My mom’s rule was that for every five comic books I read, I had to read a classic. I read Shakespeare and Beowulf while other kids were learning how to diagram sentences and learning to conjugate so they could fill out job applications. My fantasies weren’t inspired by John Wayne but by Jules Verne’s 20,000  Leagues Under the Sea and Dumas’s The Three Musketeers. When I was in the room by myself reading, I would stand in front of the mirror pretending to be all those people in the books. I was acting for myself before I ever did it for anybody else.

PLAYBOY: Because of your involvement in the protest at school you were convicted for unlawful confinement. What did your family think of your evolving politics and budding involvement with the black power movement?
JACKSON: They actually got my militancy. They just didn’t want me to get killed running around, chanting with my fists in the air. But I was in Atlanta doing that anyway. One time, I had come home from school to Tennessee. From the time I was an infant, my grandmother had been buying all these bullshit life insurance and burial policies, and every week this insurance guy, Mr Venable, came to collect his nickel premiums. I had my hair braided and was sitting on the porch, and he walked up and said, “Hi, Sam, is Pearl here?” I said, “Motherfucker, why you calling my grandmother, a woman three times your age, Pearl?” I was cursing and yelling, babbling at him, and before I knew it, my grandmother was out the door and had me  by the hair, going, “What the hell is wrong with you?” It was the first time in his life Mr Venable thought he might have been wrong, and he felt bad, saying, “I don’t call anybody else older than me by their first name.” But my grandmother kicked my ass after he left. She still thought that he was going to call somebody and have me hanged.




Tersha Makwiya by Leah Hawker
Nov. 14, 2013


Tersha Makwiya - Playboy Playmate May 2013 is stunning, and probably has a lot going for her. But, she like others have decided to launch into nudity. Her reasons are hers. Always interested in why I would ask of her if I could.  Choices made reveal so much about us to us. www.playboy.co.za/playmates/tersha-makwiya/