Samuel L. Jackson Is Still Cross About Missing Out On Reservoir Dogs

We might have seen Samuel L. Jackson unleash hell slightly sooner than ‘Pulp Fiction’, but it just wasn’t to be.

Now the Tarantino regular has spoken about how he lost out on a role in 'Reservoir Dogs’, after he made a hash of the audition.

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In an interview with New York magazine around the forthcoming release of Tarantino’s latest, 'The Hateful Eight’, the 66-year-old star explains how it all went awry.

And it was partly Tarantino’s fault, too.

He’d gone into the audition believing he was reading with Tim Roth and Harvey Keitel, and for the role of Mr. Orange (which eventually went to Roth).

At the time, Jackson was riding the heat of his performance in Spike Lee’s 'Jungle Fever’, which had won him a Best Supporting Actor gong at the Cannes Film Festival.

However, on entering the room, Jackson, who is a stickler for learning and memorising his lines, was confronted with two men he didn’t know, who didn’t know their lines and would frequently break down into laughter.

“I didn’t realize it was Quentin, the director-writer, and Lawrence Bender, the producer,” he said.

“But I knew that the audition was not very good.

“My agent and manager tell me that my expectations of everybody else being as prepared as I am is my biggest problem.”

Jackson bumped into Tarantino at the movie’s premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, where he told the director 'I think you would have had a better movie with me in it’.

Luckily, Tarantino told him that he was writing something with him in mind, and within weeks, a script for 'Pulp Fiction’ had arrived on his doormat, with a note reading 'If you show this script to anyone, we’ll show up at your door next week and kill you’.

The audition for the assassin Jules Winnfield went much better, perhaps because he was fired up after someone in casting greeted him as 'Mr Fishburne’.

The rest is history – not to mention an Oscar nomination – with Jackson becoming a household name at the age of 46.

He also adds that on 'Pulp Fiction’, he and the director realised that they had 'a kind of cinematic affinity’.

“Quentin would walk by my trailer, and he would always hear the sounds of either kung-fu fighting or bullets going off, and he would look in the door and say, ‘What are you watching?’,” he said.

In 'The Hateful Eight’, Jackson is playing a former Union officer, turned bounty hunter in the aftermath of the American Civil War.

The movie, which also stars Roth, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kurt Russell, Bruce Dern and Michael Madsen, is out on January 8.

Image credits: Getty/Rex Features/Weinstein Company