IT'S not easy to find someone on a golf course, even when that person is the biggest box office star of all time, but I follow the crowds and locate Samuel L Jackson on the green of the second hole at Kingsbarns. He's playing in a pro-celebrity tournament, the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship, which takes place every year on the Fife coast.
The actor is leaning insouciantly on an iron, ankles crossed, the frothing sea at his back, as Tim Henman's ball skirts the hole, provoking an "Oooh" from the crowd. Could the tennis star have been put off by having Jackson's astonishing black and white check trousers right in his eye-line?
Jackson once described golf courses as "the only place I can go dressed as a pimp and fit in perfectly" but today, breeks apart, he's dressed tastefully in cosy cream jumper, white hat and Adidas spikes. He's funny, managing to make even Colin Montgomerie smile. At the seventh, he tees off with a shout – "Go ball! Be the one! Ah-ha!" – like some bad-ass Alan Partridge.
He finishes on six-under, whips off his hat, signs a dozen autographs and strides into the clubhouse for the interview. We chat first about golf. Jackson came to the game late, and reckons if he had taken it up sooner he would now be a well known professional. He's competitive, pleased to be recognised as the world's highest-grossing actor, his films having taken more money at the box office – $7.42bn – than his nearest rival, Harrison Ford. He has made 75 pictures. In his latest, Lakeview Terrace, directed by Neil LaBute, he plays a racist cop.
Jackson seems unusually interested in the public response to his work, or at least unusually candid about his interest; he reads reviews of his films and goes to public screenings. Though he had been working for years, and earning kudos as a Spike Lee regular, it was Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction which, at the age of 45, brought him mainstream attention. Follow-up tough guy roles and his larger-than-life persona have made him iconic, which is positive in that it brings money and transglobal adulation, but he has become a little cartoonish in his public image – the ice-cool dude in the Kangol cap. In fact he's more complex and thoughtful than that.
Born in 1948, he grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, home of the choo-choo. It was a segregated city. He didn't know any white people. He'd come across them when he went downtown, and knew that in these encounters he had to project himself slightly differently. Was that formative acting experience?
"I just always knew that I lived in two worlds," he says. "There was the world of my house and community, but to make my way in that white world I had to modify the way I spoke and acted. I had to sometimes not make direct eye contact. I also knew that I lived in a place that I didn't want to spend the rest of my life in. I read a lot of books about other places. I knew that when the opportunity presented itself I was going to go out there and see the rest of the world."
His childhood sounds like Tarantino's. Both were raised by their mothers, their fathers absent, and both spent entire days in the cinema or reading in their rooms. There's a sense of an insular early life, a pulling back of the drawstring in preparation for great public achievement.
For a while, drugs and alcohol got in the way. Jackson was a tremendous boozer and user, a believer in the romantic myth that derangement of the senses is part of being an artist. His downfall was addiction to crack cocaine. He went straight in 1990 after his wife and eight-year-old daughter discovered him unconscious on the kitchen floor, coke cooked on the table. After rehab, he made Jungle Fever with Spike Lee; his powerful performance as a crack addict launched his film career. So does he see cleaning up as the key dividing line in his life and work?
"Yeah, it's a definite before and after thing," he says. "Before, I was lurking in obscurity, and after, I burst on the scene. There was a palpable difference. I'm very aware and careful of that. So when I get tempted…" He corrects himself: "Or back in the day when I did get tempted, I would ask myself: 'Do you want to be like that, or would you rather be like this? And I always choose this.'"
Does he consider his wasted years as years wasted? "No, it was totally valuable. I was so connected to the theatre and my work that I held on to the lessons, the friendships and the ability to continue to develop as an actor throughout the drugs and alcohol. All these things inform who you are, and I understood, through rehab, things about creating characters. I understood that creating whole people means knowing where we come from, how we can make a mistake and how we overcome things to make ourselves stronger."
Jackson spent years as a stage actor touring America, Asia and Europe, having studied drama at Morehouse College, Atlanta. The Morehouse years were eventful. Martin Luther King Jr's funeral was held on the campus. "I ended up being an usher and helping people find their seats. It was a sad occasion." Two days after Dr King was killed, Jackson flew to Memphis on a plane chartered by Bill Cosby to attend a protest march. It was on the flight that he first saw LaTanya Richardson, a fellow student who would become his wife.
Was King's assassination the great radicalising event of his life? "No, I'd been political before that. I'd been part of the civil rights movement in Tennessee. In college I met a lot of activists and took part in demonstrations about different things including the Vietnam war."
The Black Power movement was associated, sometimes, with violence. Was Jackson involved in that? "On the fringes, possibly. I lived in the office of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee for a while and spent time with Stokely Carmichael and H Rap Brown." Both SNCC leaders advocated violent revolution. "I had a couple of other friends who were arrested for bomb-making," Jackson continues. "I always assumed that the bombs were planted in their cars to get them off the streets. We're all conspiracy theorists when it comes to the government and protest."
What would the fiery Jackson of 1968 make of the golf-playing movie star in 2008? The question gets a laugh. "He would think that I had sold out, given up on the revolution and become co-opted, which is probably true. I stopped being a political animal for a while, and in that time the world changed." He means the tumultuous years of the Bush presidency. "I made personal improvements and I got rich, but I didn't do anything to stop the US or our government becoming what it is now. But I've realised I need to be a part of it again, and that's why I'm participating in the election. I'm out there supporting Barack vocally and financially."
He spoke for Obama at a rally in Texas. "Because of where I come from, I never thought I'd see in my life a black candidate running for President," he says now. "We need to change America's image round the world. America has lost some lustre in terms of how folks aspire to be like us. I think Barack will take us back to that place. He also cares about a segment of society that got thrown away in the last eight years – the have-nots. My relatives are have-not people, and the only way they can live the American dream is by having a President who understands that the people with all the money have to help the lowest percentile. Who cares if we have to pay more taxes?"
I mention Sarah Palin and he makes it clear he doesn't think she's smart. "That's a problem because we've been dumbing ourselves down for a long time. We need somebody with intelligence to make the big decisions."
So is Jackson reconnecting with the spirit of 1968? "Yes," he grins, "I am." It's a pleasant note on which to end the interview – that two months away from his 60th birthday he's rediscovering the political fire in which his character was forged. As he gets up and heads for his hotel, I hear the security man's walkie-talkie crackle into life: "Samuel L Jackson has left the building."
• The Dunhill Links Championship continues today
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