Samuel L Jackson names the best co-star he ever worked with: “We kinda loved each other”

It’s rare that you can put numbers behind an actor’s status in Hollywood, but Samuel L Jackson makes it easy. He is the highest-grossing actor of all time, with his films having earned a collective $27 billion. It’s one thing to be in some of the most commercially successful movies ever made, but it’s another to also have been in some of the most beloved movies ever made. Jackson’s CV is pretty remarkable. He was in Do the Right Thing!, Jurassic Park, and Pulp Fiction, to name a few, as well as a handful of other Quentin Tarantino movies. 

Throughout his career, Jackson has had ample opportunities to work with some of the greatest living actors, be they eager up-and-comers or long-standing stars. He’s worked with Bruce Willis, John Travolta, Scarlett Johansson, Jamie Foxx, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Annette Bening. Run through his 200-plus credits, and you’ll see that he’s brushed shoulders with the best.

Still, of all the actors he’s worked with, Jackson remembers one with particular fondness. In 1996, he starred alongside Geena Davis in the action movie The Long Kiss Goodnight, and the two hit it off immediately. In the film, Davis plays Samantha Caine, a teacher in a small town who suffers from amnesia. After hitting her head, she starts to remember bits and pieces of her past as a top CIA assassin named Charly Baltimore, and it sets her on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a group of mysterious hitmen. Jackson played Mitch Henessey, a shady, low-level private investigator who becomes ensnared in the drama and turns into the only person Charly can trust.

It was a gruelling shoot. Davis did the majority of her stunts, and the temperature was well below freezing most of the time because they were shooting in Toronto in the winter. She and Jackson even had to film a scene in which they smashed through a glass window and plunged into a hole in a frozen lake. Director Renny Harlin, who was married to Davis at the time, made them do the scene three times before he got a take he was satisfied with.

“Being with Geena, it was like a road movie,” Jackson said during a career retrospective for GQ. “I had such a good time with her, and she was so giving. We kinda loved each other in a way while we were doing this movie.” It was, he said, completely different from the relationships he developed with other actors throughout his career.

Davis was equally enamoured of Jackson. In her memoir, Dying of Politeness, she wrote, “He and I got along famously; he’s incredibly funny, and we were just crazy about each other.” She cited that harrowing plunge into the frozen lake and described her co-star as “always cool, always willing, totally unflappable.”

Jackson almost didn’t get the opportunity to appear in the film at all. When he read the script, he knew he wanted to be in it, but when he got in touch with the studio, he was told that the character was supposed to be white. Luckily, he bumped into Davis and Harlin at a party and when they heard he was interested in the film, they hired him on the spot. 

His performance turned out to be a highlight of the movie. In the original script, Mitch died trying to save Charly. When test audiences saw the film, however, they were so overwhelmingly outraged by his fate that they had to reshoot the final scenes a few weeks before the film was released and give the character the happy ending he deserved.