Samuel L. Jackson's anything but cagey. The fact that's he's brutally honest is one of the things fans love about him. It's also what tends to get him a lot of press, like when he called out a reporter for thinking he was Laurence Fishburne. But Sam has also been vocal about the movies he's been in, such as Snakes on a Plane or Star Wars, which he campaigned to be in.
But what about Jurassic Park?
While Sam's role in the 1993 blockbuster hit was on the smaller side, it was utterly memorable... particularly his off-screen death. Sam has talked about Jurassic Park publically a few times, but his thoughts on his death scene are by far the most interesting...
Sam Was Supposed To Have A Much Better Death Scene And He's Kinda Mad About It
Sam Jackson is the star of some of cinema's most over-the-top and, for lack of a better word, beloved death scenes. Unlike some actors who are overly precious about keeping their characters alive, Sam actually likes dying. At least, he likes going out in style. As he's publically said, "I don't mind dying. I just don't want to go out like some punk."
Because of this perspective, numerous filmmakers have found outlandishly inventive and gruesome ways of killing Sam. Among the most famous are being blown up in Django Unchained, dismembered, electrified, and thrown off a building in Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith, stabbed through the heart by a weaponized leg in Kingsman: The Secret Service, and unceremoniously eaten by a shark, who proceeded to share his lifeless body with another shark, in Deep Blue Sea.
While the fact that he died in Jurassic Park was certainly memorable, as it added a scare, it was really more of a mystery.
If you remember, Sam's character, Ray Arnold, volunteers to go to the maintenance shed to manually reboot a number of the programs after shutting down the Jurassic Park system in order to undo the damage done by Wayne Knight's Dennis Nedry.
After he fails to reboot the programs (including the phone and security systems) and doesn't return to the surviving characters, Laura Dern's Dr. Ellie Satler decides to go do it herself. Once she gets to the maintenance shed, she comes across Ray... or rather, his arm...
Before we can really figure out what happened to Ray, Ellie is attacked by a velociraptor. While it's obvious that it's this dinosaur that took out Sam's character, we don't know how. So, there's a bit of a mystery there. But there wasn't supposed to be.
According to an interview with A.V. Club, we were actually going to see Sam's character get attacked and killed by the velociraptor. In fact, it sounds as though Samuel L. Jackson could've added another extremely gruesome death scene to his resume... after all, his arm got ripped off.
"I was actually supposed to go to Hawaii, to shoot my death scene," Sam Jackson explained in the interview. "But there was a hurricane that destroyed all the sets. So I didn't get to go to Hawaii... All you see [in the movie] is the residue of my body, my arm. But yeah, I was supposed to be on set."
This was the very same hurricane that actually stranded the majority of the cast members on the island. The hurricane itself ripped through most of the Hawaiian island chain and decimated local businesses. It basically meant that filming Jurassic Park on location was impossible. Luckily, sets were built in Los Angeles for the indoor units, meaning the cast was eventually able to fly back and resume filming there.
But that also meant that Sam never got to fly to Hawaii to film any of his scenes, including the one that would have killed off his character.
Other Thoughts Sam Has Had About Jurassic Park
Sam claims to be incredibly grateful for his role in Jurassic Park and, in his A.V. Club interview, claimed to really get along with some of the other cast members.
"I enjoyed being on that set, with Jeff [Goldblum] and Sir Richard Attenborough," Sam Jackson said in his A.V. Club interview. "It's funny, because Steven would actually operate the camera sometimes. He'd consider the camera, and he'd be kind of looking at me, and he'd go, 'Okay, I'm going to get you,' and everybody just has to start scrambling, and we'd shoot. He actually shot a few of the things that I'm in, in that lab, with that long ash dangling off that cigarette. Hogging that fake cigarette. Because I had quit smoking, and he wanted to make sure I didn't go back, so he got me the worst-tasting fake cigarettes ever."
While Sam missed the chance to die on-screen, it's clear that he had a blast filming what has since gone down as one of the most memorable and beloved films of all time.
