samuel Jackson Opens up about addiction to crack

Samuel L. Jackson is getting straightforward about his previous fight with drug addiction in a brand-new interview. Through the ’80s and also ’90s, Jackson became addicted to crack cocaine, though he somehow handled to maintain jobs and stay successful.

While talking to The Hollywood Reporter, the 70-year-old star remembers smoking crack while working as an understudy on Broadway in August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson. He was observing Charles Dutton, who played the lead and furious Jackson with his performances.

“I had to sit there every night on the steps behind the theater and listen to Charles Dutton do that part,” he explains. “I’d sit there and smoke crack while I listened to the play. It made me fucking crazy. Because I’d be listening to him doing the lines and going, ‘That’s not right!’”

Jackson additionally remembers one more evening when was a smoking crack and also disclosed another actor he considerably admired– Jessica Lange. She was taking a smoke break while working on A Tram Called Desire. Just a couple of years later, the pair were co-starring in Losing Isaiah.

“We would smoke cigarettes together in the rain under this awning where we were shooting in Chicago,” Jackson shares. “It was fun. However, I never said, ‘Hey Jessica, I used to watch you while smoking crack’ or nothing.”

Jackson hit the bottom of the pit when his better half and also daughter uncovered him facedown on the cooking area one day. They insisted he gets help or leaves. Though, while sobering up, he was sent out a manuscript from Spike Lee. The already well-known director desired Jackson to work as a crack addict in his next movie, Forest Fever, which he did. Ironically, it was his very first sober duty.

“All the people in rehab were trying to talk me out of it,” he says. ” ‘You’re going to be messing around with crack pipes. All your triggers will be there. Blah, blah, blah.’ I was like, ‘You know what? If for no other reason than I never want to see you motherf**kers again, I will never pick up another drug.’ ‘Cause I hated their a**es.”

Jackson also recalls auditioning with a “dreadful” actor for a role in an indie movie called Reservoir Dogs. It ended up that awful actor was Quentin Tarantino, the film’s director. Jackson remained in the audience at the Sundance premiere of the movie, where he decided to speak with Tarantino once more.’’

“I was thinking, ‘Well, good movie,’ he tells THR. “Then I realized that dude who I read with was the director! So I go over to him and tell him how much I liked the movie but how it would’ve been a better movie with me in it. So he said, ‘Well, I’m writing something right now for you.’ I was like, ‘Really? You remember me that well?’ And then about two weeks later, Pulp Fiction came.”

That’s when he shared being so thunderstruck by the script, he read it twice. He explains how it captivated his whole being, and took it as a test, saying, “I vividly remember getting to the end of it and being like, ‘Wow. Get the fuck outta here,’” he says. “‘Is this shit that good or am I just thinking, because he wrote it for me, I think it’s that good?’ So boom, I flipped it over and read it through again.”