Samuel L. Jackson has done a lot of crazy things in movies throughout his 50-year career. Today on The Jennifer Hudson Show, she asked him what was the craziest.
Do you think it was from one of his Quentin Tarantino movies? Or how about one of the many, many times he has played Nick Fury? If you thought it was one of those films, you would be wrong. It was actually 1996’s The Long Kiss Goodnight.
In that movie, he and Geena Davis are escaping a shootout in a train station as a grenade is going off. Davis uses her machine gun to shoot out the window so that they can jump down into the ice below. Then, as they freefalling to the ground, she shoots at the ice to break it. And then we see them hit the ice and come up for air.
You would think that director Renny Harlin would have used stunt doubles for his wife and Jackson, but he didn’t. So the two actors were submerged in the freezing cold water to make that scene look realistic.
So they would have to go down into the frozen water, stay there for 5 seconds, come up, run across the ice, and wait in a hot tub so the director could see how it looked.
After the first try, Harlin wasn’t happy. So they did it four more times. By the fifth time, EMS was waiting on standby. And that was a good thing because Jackson woke up in his trailer covered in one of those silver warming blankets after the fifth take.
So you would think after all of that, he would have hated that film. But he loves it so much that it is actually one of his favorites.
It was definitely memorable for him. To see that unforgettable scene, then
