Samuel L. Jackson Couldn’t Believe How Quickly He Blew Through His Marvel Deal
Samuel L. Jackson has been a part of the Marvel universe since his shocking 2008 after-credits scene in the first Iron Man film. After signing his deal with the studio, Jackson expected to be in it for the long haul. Only to find out that it wasn’t all that long after all.
Why Samuel L. Jackson was shocked by his Marvel deal
Jackson has been Nick Fury even before his first live-action appearance as the character. As he famously recalled, the Marvel’s Nick Fury was modeled after him in its Ultimate comics. This was a huge departure from Fury’s more traditional look in the comics, which Jackson quickly took notice of.
“I still buy comic books, so I go to this store in L.A., Golden Apple, and I was in there one day and I’m passing the rack and I see this thing, The Ultimates, and I go, ‘Wow, it looks like me,’” Jackson said in an interview with Comicbook. “So I started looking, and it’s like, Nick Fury looks just like me, and I’m reading, and he goes, ‘Well, if they make a movie about us, who do you want to play you?’ and Nick Fury goes, ‘Samuel L. Jackson.’ I go, ‘I didn’t give anybody my permission to use my image in a comic book.’”
Jackson soon discovered that Marvel remade Fury in his image just in case they ever made a live action movie feautring the character. The plan was for the Pulp Fiction star to portray Fury in a hypothetical film role, which was what exactly ended up happening. However, Jackson remembered being a bit taken back by just how long he was expected to play Fury for.
“I knew I had a nine-picture deal,” Jackson said in an interview with GQ. “When Kevin [Feige] said that, ‘We’re gonna offer you a nine-picture deal,’ I thought, ‘How long I gotta stay alive to make nine movies?’”
But what might’ve been even more surprising was how quickly Jackson went through nine movies. At its peak, the Marvel Cinematic Universe put out two, and sometimes even three, movies a year. This meant that Jackson could honor his multi-year contract much earlier than expected.
“I didn’t know they were going to make nine movies in like two and a half years. It’s kinda crazy, like, ‘Oh s***, I’m using up my contracts! But it all worked out,” he said.
Samuel L. Jackson was constantly afraid Nick Fury would be killed off
Jackson not only ended up honoring his nine-picture deal, but went beyond that. Jackson has been doing a few of Marvel’s streaming projects like …What If?, where he voices the S.H.I.E.LD. Agent. Additionally, Jackson also led his own Disney + series Secret Invasion. But at one point, he wasn’t sure he’d last this long, and kept bracing for news that Fury wasn’t going to make.
“My biggest concern with Marvel was trying to keep them from killing me more than anything else,” Jackson once told Rolling Stone. “I kind of liked the gig!”
These feelings seemed to intensify whenever Jackson had a meeting with the studio.
“When they called me in to tell me what’s going on, I always thought they were trying to kill me,” he said.
But not only is Fury still alive, but he’s outlived a few of the other Avengers characters as well. And with Fury still a major part of the MCU, Jackson has pitched his own ideas about what the character could do in the future.
“All the Black people in the Marvel Universe were trying to figure out, ‘Why can’t we go to Wakanda?’ Me, Don [Cheadle], Anthony Mackie… but they made it,” Jackson said. “They got to go fight. I still didn’t get there. I thought that about Civil War when the kids were fighting. The kids are fighting and I’m not gonna make them go to their rooms? How does that make sense?”
