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Samuel L. Jackson is one of our greatest living actors. He may only have a single Oscar nomination in his career, but he’s behind some of the most memorable roles in modern movie history. This makes it more than a little disturbing to learn that we might have been robbed of many of those roles as Jackson reveals he nearly died 35 years ago.
In a recent appearance on the Mad Sad Bad podcast, Jackson relayed a story about getting his foot caught in the door of a subway train, resulting in him getting dragged a significant distance. He says he believed he was going to die that day. He described the situation, saying:
I got dragged by a subway train in New York in 1990. I got dragged by the A train. Fortunately, I was in the middle door of the last car, and it was a long-ass train station. And when the door closed on my foot, [the] train took off. So I’m sitting there thinking, I’m like, ‘Oh, fuck, I’m going to die.’
I can only imagine what it’s like to have a true feeling that you might be heading toward death. It’s certainly not a feeling anybody wants to experience. Actors have occasionally been afraid they were going to die on a movie set when they were doing something dangerous. Tom Cruise risks his life on a regular basis, but nobody expects to be in fear for their life just using the subway.
Jackson saw what he believed would mean his death in the form of the train entering a tunnel, and no matter what he did, he could not find a way to escape it. He says that despite the speed of the train, the experience seemed to happen to him in slow motion, until the train actually slowed to a stop. He said:
I could see the tunnel coming, and I couldn’t figure out anything that I could grab or hold on to and get close to the train so I wouldn’t get killed in the tunnel. It just slowed down really, really slow until all of a sudden the train stopped.
Jackson says he didn’t actually learn what happened to cause the train to stop until two years later. He sued the transit system over the incident, and it was only when he was in court that he realized that it was a somewhat unlikely citizen who ultimately saved his life. Jackson explained:
The guy who pulled the emergency cord was on crutches. Everybody else in there was trying to open the door, get my foot out the door, push and push and pull and try and take my shoe off. And he was going to the emergency cord, and he finally pulled it and stopped it.
It’s unclear how close Samuel L. Jackson actually came to death, but the situation sounds absolutely horrifying.
Anybody dying in a random subway accident would be terrible, but had Samuel L. Jackson actually died, the world would have been robbed of some iconic films and performances. While the actor had done some memorable character work by 1990, he wouldn’t have his breakout role in Pulp Fiction until 1994. If we’d lost him four years earlier, we wouldn’t even have known what it was we lost.