(Credit: Alamy)
Samuel L Jackson is no stranger to reprising his most beloved roles in sequels. After all, this man will have played Nick Fury in approximately 642 Marvel movies by the time it’s all said and done. In all seriousness, though, Jackson has also played Elijah ‘Mr Glass’ Price in Unbreakable and Glass, Mace Windu in the Star Wars prequels, Agent Augustus Gibbons in two XXX movies, and Darius Kincaid in two Hitman’s Bodyguard pictures. OK, so maybe he’ll reprise some of his less beloved roles, too, if the price is right. There is one part that Jackson has always wanted to return to, though, and it’s never come to pass despite the star pushing for it over the years.
In the mid-1990s, Jackson was experiencing the first few years of superstardom. He’d blasted into the public consciousness with Pulp Fiction in 1994, then followed that up by starring with Bruce Willis again in Die Hard with a Vengeance. A supporting turn in Joel Schumacher’s hit legal thriller A Time to Kill was next, followed by a charismatic co-lead role in the Shane Black-scripted action comedy The Long Kiss Goodnight.
Fascinatingly, Jackson pursued Long Kiss hard after reading the script and loving the fast-talking character of Private Eye Mitch Hennessey. However, he was repeatedly turned down by the studio despite telling his agent multiple times to insist to the executives that he wanted to read for the role. Frustrated and confused, Jackson took the opportunity to corner Long Kiss director Renny Harlin and star Geena Davis at a Hollywood soiree. He told Vulture that he asked, “Hey man, why won’t you let me read for your movie?”
To Jackson’s surprise, Harlin simply looked bemused and asked him to clarify what he meant by that question. Jackson said, “Yeah. The Long Kiss Goodnight, they won’t let me come in.” It turned out that Harlin had no idea Jackson wanted to audition, but now that he knew, he asked, “You want be in the movie?” When Jackson replied with an exasperated “Yeah!” Harlin told him, “You’re in the movie.” Sure enough, without having to audition or read for the part, an offer was on Jackson’s desk the following week.
Jackson later found out that the studio was nervous about him playing the role because, in the script’s first draft, Hennessey and Davis’ Charly Baltimore had a much more romantic relationship. Or, as Jackson eloquently put it, “He literally fucked her in the first script. Or she fucked him.” At this time in Hollywood, mixed-race romantic encounters on-screen were not the norm, so when Jackson came on board, the romance subplot was excised.
Amazingly, Jackson didn’t let this queasy example of Hollywood’s institutional racism put him off the film, which shows just how much he loved Hennessey. Amusingly, though, Jackson wasn’t the only person who loved the wise-cracking sleuth with a heart of gold – audiences did, too. When Harlin previewed an early cut of Long Kiss that saw Hennessey perish at the end, an audience member yelled, “You can’t kill Sam Jackson!” Mercifully, the ending was rewritten to have Hennessey survive.
To Jackson’s chagrin, though, Long Kiss didn’t set the box office on fire. It wasn’t a flop by any means, but it didn’t make enough to immediately justify the sequel he wanted to star in so badly. In 2018, he revealed the film is his favourite of his own movies to watch, and in 2015, he told Vulture, “Long Kiss is an awesome movie. And I still love Mitch Hennessy. I’d do a Mitch Hennessy movie in a minute.”
In fact, Jackson had pondered a vague plot for a potential sequel in which Charly’s grown-up daughter wants to know more about her homemaker/secret assassin mother – so she tracks down Hennessey, the one man who can give her answers. When Vulture pointed out that another Top Gun movie was in the works decades after the original, Jackson grinned with renewed hope and exclaimed, “Come find Mitch. Come find Mitch Hennessey!”
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