This, of course, is meat and drink to the near-workaholic Jackson. The Legend of Tarzan reunites Jackson with screenwriter Craig Brewer, who conjured up a magical role for Jackson in the steamy 2007 racial melodrama Black Snake Moan, and who is intent here, as in his movies as a writer-director (Moan, Hustle and Flow), on creating provocative black characters. Jackson as hitman Jules in Pulp Fiction (1994), the film that projected him into the mainstream. Anyway, he ran out of money and that’s when he enlisted that army to go there. Because Leopold ran out of money – though how the fuck he ran out of money I don’t know, because he was pulling diamonds and rubber out of there, and rubber was like liquid gold at the time. He wants to prevent the British and American governments from helping Leopold build his railroad. He’s talked to some soldiers that were there doing bad things and he wants to find a way to stop these things. “Williams is in the movie trying to convince Tarzan – who hasn’t been in Africa for 20 years – to go home and investigate King Leopold. “Hopefully with this movie, we can persuade people to look into George Washington Williams’ story and, through him, find out about that first holocaust in the Congo,” says Jackson. This is something like the 200th Tarzan movie since 1918, but the first major reboot since the failure of Greystoke in 1984 The Legend of Tarzan seems prepared to situate itself amid some very dark and troubling history. The villain of the piece, played by Christoph Waltz, is another real-life figure, colonial administrator and mass killer Captain Léon Rom, likely one of the inspirations for Conrad’s Mr Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. Thus is the nightmare of colonial Congo grafted on to the fantasy universe of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan series. It was an important milestone on the long road to ending the horrors of the rubber trade. He documented the cruelties of the Belgian rubber-harvesting industry there – maimings, executions, atrocities without number, millions dead – and on his return pointed fingers at both King Leopold of Belgium (to his face, no less) and his local agent, the explorer/exploiter Henry Stanley, implicating them in what was not yet termed a “genocide”. Williams died in Blackpool in 1891, of tuberculosis, on his way back to the US after making an important intervention in the Belgian-backed proto-holocaust against the people of the Congo. Jackson with Alexander Skarsgard in The Legend of Tarzan. For a historically minded man such as Jackson, whose teenage years coincided with the optimistic height of the civil rights struggle, and who was a young Black Panther in the bleak and treacherous COINTELPRO years, the role probes some unfamiliar backwaters of the African-American experience. Jackson’s latest role, in The Legend of Tarzan, is a real-life figure inserted into a fictional universe, George Washington Williams, who achieved things in his lifetime that one is shocked and pleased to learn were achieved by any black American in the latter half of the 19th century. No steady progression from dark to grey to white means the ageing process seems almost to have halted itself, and the man before me today, shaven-headed, tall, enviably lean and energetic, talkative and affable, could pass for a fit 45-year-old. I think we’ve all come to accept that Jackson keeps a rotating carousel of different movie wigs somewhere at home, and that none of his movie hair is ever real. It’s the hair, probably, or the absence of it. E veryone thinks Samuel L Jackson is about 15 years younger than he really is.
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