Samuel L. Jackson has opened up about his experience shooting 1999 shark movie Deep Blue Sea.
Speaking to The Guardian, Jackson recalled his time on set of the underwater thriller. He said: “I had no idea I was going to be as wet as I was. I was in water for a month: it was kind of wild.
“For the storm scenes, they were dumping water down on us from towers, like big-ass waves flying everywhere. After Stellan Skarsgård has his arm bitten off and we’re out on the deck trying to get him on the helicopter, we didn’t know they were going to throw that much water. The rehearsals had been very different.”
Directed by Die Hard 2’s Renny Harlin, Deep Blue Sea also stars LL Cool J, Saffron Burrows and Michael Rapaport. Set in an underwater research facility, it sees a team of scientists plunged into terror and chaos when multiple genetically-engineered sharks start attacking them.
The film includes an iconic death scene for Jackson’s character Russell Franklin, eaten by a shark as he gives a rousing speech to his crewmates. Despite it being so early in the film, the Pulp Fiction star explained that it’s the kind of screen death he’d always wanted to have.
He said: “I’d always wanted to be killed in a movie by something big that was chasing me. I missed out on my death scene in Jurassic Park because a hurricane destroyed the set in Hawaii, so I never got to go down and get eaten by a velociraptor.
“When Renny Harlin told me he was making a horror movie with killer sharks, and that I was going to be the first person to die, I said: “Great!” It was a good idea – once he’d killed me, it meant any character’s life was up for grabs.”
Jackson continued: “As a kid, you go to movies, you watch people die, then you play games where you act out death scenes of your own. You bounce off the walls and stagger around, fall over, pick yourself up off the floor, say something, finally fall down for good – give it a bit of James Cagney.
“I’ve had very varied deaths in movies, but everyone remembers this one. It was great being at the premiere, having not told any of my friends, and seeing them react. Usually in movies like that, all the black people get killed early, but in Deep Blue Sea, LL Cool J is the last one alive. That felt like a small victory.”
Recently, Jackson made a surprise appearance introducing Kendrick Lamar at the Super Bowl, dressed as Uncle Sam. Elsewhere, Salma Hayek revealed that she couldn’t stop swearing after working with him on The Hitman’s Bodyguard movies.