  Samuel L. Jackson says people will remember the late Bernie Mac for his role in Soul Men. (Handout) |
LOS ANGELES — Gallows humour and grief often share the same stage.
So when Bernie Mac and Isaac Hayes died within 30 hours of each other this past summer, Samuel L. Jackson’s daughter couldn’t help but observe the obvious. “She said, ‘We have to get you to a safe-house,’ ” remembers Jackson, who stars with both performers in the new comedy Soul Men.
“Her sense of humour is like mine because I was thinking the very same thing.”
Mac, 50, died Aug. 9 from complications relating to pneumonia. Music legend Hayes, 65, suffered a fatal stroke the following day.
Director Malcolm Lee describes the period as “surreal. It was a crazy summer. I’d heard for about a week that (Mac) was sick, that he had died, that he was going to make a full recovery, that he was in the hospital — you didn’t know what to believe. I was warned it was looking a little dire.”
Finally he got the call early that morning. “You never get an early morning good call, so I knew it was bad news. I was sorry to hear it and sorry for his wife and his daughter and granddaughter and son-in-law ... He was a family man. He was not a Hollywood guy. He didn’t live here; he lived in Chicago where he grew up. He lived simply. He wasn’t getting the extravagant lobster and shrimp meals. He was a chicken and hamburger kinda guy.”
Opening in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver on Friday, and in other Canadian markets soon after, Soul Men stars Jackson and Mac as bickering, estranged soul singers reunited by the death of their former lead singer (John Legend).
Friends for more than a decade, Jackson and Mac had spent years searching for a project to collaborate on. “People came up with different ideas and none of them worked or made sense to us,” Jackson says. “Some of the concepts had us playing guys who are rivals in a barbeque contest or rival car salesman on opposite corners of the street from each other. All these ideas got thrown on the wall, but never stuck. (Mac’s) manager came up with this concept and we sat down with some writers and threw out some ideas and told them what we wanted.”
He sums up the result as “Grumpy Old Soul Singers.” Mirroring their characters, Jackson says during production he was the resident “hard taskmaster” while Mac was “Mr. Easygoing, the peacemaker.”
The experience was “really a blessing. We had the opportunity to be there and watch him do what he does and have as much fun as he was having.”
Mac suffered from sarcoidosis, a chronic disease that can inflame the lungs.
Despite this, Jackson says Mac never let that interfere with his work. “Bernie’s Bernie. The show must go on — that was him. He was a trooper.”
Although the late comic will be seen next year in Old Dogs with Robin Williams and John Travolta, Soul Men represents his last starring role. “It bothers me Bernie didn’t see the movie because it’s an amazing tribute to who he was and what he did,” Jackson says. “I think it’s some of the best work he ever did. People are going to remember him in this film when they see it.”
Fame a hard game
As if we didn’t already suspect: All you need to know about being famous you can learn from Entourage.
This according to Samuel L. Jackson.
“(Fame) can screw you up unless you have people around you to keep you grounded. If you just have an entourage around you, those guys just want to have fun too. It’s kind of like Entourage,” he says, referring to the Emmy-winning HBO series about a young Hollywood superstar and his close-knit pack of hangers-on. “You see what happens there. The other guys get into more trouble than you do yourself because they need you to do something so that they all have access to it ... There’s a pecking order in the world most people don’t realize. When you’re hanging out with athletes, they tell you how much they love your movies because that’s what they do all day: They watch your movies. When you go to a club and it’s athlete, movie star and musician, the movie star gets to pick first, then the rock star gets to pick, then the athlete gets to pick. It can mess you up, people telling you how great you are and you believing it.”
Jackson’s own fame was blunted by the fact it was anything but sudden.
“I was grown when it happened. I was old. I had already done all the things I was going to do. I was an actor in New York. I had been through my drug and alcohol days and been through rehab and done everything else. So by the time of Jungle Fever and the whole world opening up to me in this particular way, I had already done doing all that. I never had that kind of issue. But I can imagine what it would be like for a 19-year-old kid.”
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