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Samuel L. Jackson has said a cut scene from A Time to Kill could have won him an Oscar.
The film, directed by Joel Schumacher, co-stars Matthew McConaughey, Sandra Bullock, and Donald and Kiefer Sutherland. Jackson plays a father on trial after killing two men who raped his young daughter, based on John Grisham's novel of the same name.
In conversation with Vulture, Jackson explained that some scenes of his didn't make it to the final cut. "In A Time to Kill, when I kill those guys, I kill them because my daughter needs to know that those guys are not on the planet anymore and they will never hurt her again – that I will do anything to protect her," he said. "That's how I played that character throughout. And there were specific things we shot, things I did to make sure that she understood that, but in the editing process, they got taken out. And it looked like I killed those dudes and then planned every move to make sure that I was going to get away with it. When I saw it, I was sitting there like, 'What the fuck?'"
Some of that deleted material, though, Jackson believes could have secured him an Academy Award. "But also the things they took out kept me from getting an Oscar. 'Really, motherfuckers? You just took that shit from me?' My first day working on that film, I did a speech in a room with an actor and the whole fucking set was in tears when I finished. I was like, 'Okay. I’m on the right page.' That shit is not in the movie!" he revealed. "And I know why it's not. Because it wasn't my movie, and they weren't trying to make me a star. That was one of the first times that I saw that shit happen. There are things that I've done in other movies where I said, 'Wait a minute. Why did you take that moment out of the movie?' Because the moment, in that movie, it's bigger than the movie."
The actor has been nominated once for an Oscar – he was up for Best Supporting Actor for Pulp Fiction in 1995, but Martin Landau won for Ed Wood. Jackson is the recipient of an honorary Academy Award, however, which he was granted in 2021.
It was reported back in 2021 that A Time to Kill sequel, titled A Time of Mercy (and adapted from Grisham's novel of the same name) would be headed to Max as a limited series, with McConaughey reprising his role.
