Action star and Go The F**K To Sleep reader Samuel L. Jackson is set to star as Martin Luther King on Broadway next month, reports New York magazine.
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Jackson sat down the New York weekly and discussed his history with drugs, his time at Morehouse College and what he hopes to add to our understanding of King’s legacy.
The play, titled The Mountaintop, takes place the night before MLK’s assassination on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968.
“The King I am showing just came in from delivering the ‘I’ve Been to the Mountaintop’ speech,” Jackson told NY mag.
The reverend is very tired, and the only other actor onstage is Jackson’s longtime friend Angela Bassett, who plays Camae, a hotel employee delivering room service who stays to talk. “He’s the guy alone in a hotel room talking to a woman. He’s the man as a man, not as a martyr or ideologue. He just happened to be the guy who wasn’t afraid to stand up for the right idea. But outside of that, he was as fragile and as flawed as anyone.”
Jackson turns 63 this year and his life reads like some of the characters he’s played on screen and on stage. When he was a student at Morehouse, King’s alma mater, the versatile and scary actor held school administrators hostage while protesting against administrative decisions at the school. He’d gone to school so he could avoid the Vietnam war.
Skip forward a couple decades, specifically the ’90s, and he’s smoking crack and battling depression after a role he originated goes to another actor whom he has to understudy. The play was August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson and it went to Charles S. Dutton.
“It’s kind of what put me in rehab. I was sitting on the back steps every night, smoking crack and drinking, Jackson recalled. “I never took just one hit of nothin. I always did it till it was gone, then I got some more.”
Two weeks after sobriety, Jackson landed the role of a crackhead in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever.
The rest is history.
“It wasn’t until I let go of the idea of the brass ring that it showed up, and fortunately for me, it coincided with getting clean.”
Read the rest of this fascinating story in NY Mag.
