A post shared by Vogue Man Arabia (@voguemanarabia) on Apr 2, 2018 at 8:03am PDT

Samuel L. Jackson covers the latest issue of Vogue Man Arabia, a publication I truly didn’t know existed before this very moment. I’m glad it exists though, because Sam’s interview is really interesting and thought-provoking. Sam talks about everything from Black Panther to Die Hard to Martin Luther King Jr. to “making American great again.” You can and should read the full piece – go here. Some highlights:

He feels like ‘Die Hard with a Vengeance’ changed his career more than Pulp Fiction: “Actually, here’s the thing. Bruce Willis and I were doing Die Hard with a Vengeance when Pulp Fiction came out and we went to Cannes together to watch Pulp Fiction play for the first time. We both thought, ‘Wow, this is great!’ and Bruce said, ‘Yeah, this is good and this film will make you recognizable, but Die Hard’s going to make you a star. Die Hard will change your life.’ And it’s true. Die Hard with a Vengeance was the highest-grossing film in the world that year. That changed the agenda.”

Becoming famous in his 40s: “I was sober when it happened so that helped a lot. If it had happened sooner in my life, I would have found a way to mess it up. Being sober and understanding who I was, and what I wanted to do, and how I wanted to shape the trajectory of my career, was a result of me being more mature, but I always attribute it to my sobriety and not listening to everything people say when they tell you how great you are.”

White supremacy & MAGA: “I don’t see it as some kind of anomaly. People weren’t as open in the past when it was maybe politically incorrect to espouse some of the ideas that they can now say out loud. I never thought people stopped thinking it, but now it’s as vocal as it was when I grew up during segregation. If there was a way the country’s leaders could keep certain ethnicities from going to certain things or being in some positions then they would do that, because that seems to be the dynamic right now. I hear things like ‘make America great again’ and by ‘again,’ they mean going back to the day when a white man held all the power, women were home cooking and having babies, and the rest of the races were subservient in some way. There are a lot of things that can’t and won’t be changed because of the blood and the effort that was put in during the civil rights movement, but there are a lot of dynamics that are trying to be put back into place because of that.”

Whether Black Panther is a watershed moment for representation in Hollywood: “I’m not positive that Black Panther is going to change the dynamic of black stories being told in Hollywood and being accepted all over the world. It’s an action-adventure story and a lot of people like those, and they’ll work all over the world forever because everybody loves a hero. But not everybody loves a drama about somebody’s life experience – that’s why awards have a separate category for foreign films; they are perceived as being different. Once we stop perceiving them as different and just see them as good films and they get recognized in the same category, we’ll be laying markers.”

Django Unchained versus 12 Years a Slave: “Django Unchained was a harder and more detailed exploration of what the slavery experience was than 12 Years a Slave. But director Steve McQueen is an artist and since he’s respected for making supposedly art films, it’s held in higher esteem than Django. Because that was basically a blaxploitation movie.”

[From Vogue Man Arabia]

I find his reticence about Black Panther rather depressing, even though he’s probably right – Black Panther is a huge cultural moment and perhaps a cultural shift, but Sam’s just got to whisper, “But everybody likes a well-made action-adventure-superhero movie.” As for what he says about the MAGA Deplorables and racists… he is correct. That’s what Trump did for people, and for the larger discussions we have about race in America and beyond: what was merely thought and spoken of in dog whistles and subtextual code is now text/context. Everything is out in the open. People are just being openly racist and misogynistic and not even bothering with the dog whistles.

Photos courtesy of WENN, Instagram.