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Samuel L. Jackson may have been in over a hundred movies throughout his career, but to play SHIELD director Nick Fury, he forces himself to learn his lines with only one eye.
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“The only problem that I didn’t discover until we did the original Captain America — because I very seldom have very much to say — was that I sat at home and I did all my studying, and when I got to work the next day, I was having difficulty seeing all the lines,” he told Robin Roberts in a Good Morning America interview that aired Wednesday morning. “I could only visualize half the page. I realized that, when I cut my eye off with the patch, I cut off half my sensory perception for learning.
“So now, when I learn lines as Nick Fury,” he continued, “I learn them with one hand covering one eye so that I can visualize the whole page.”
The role of the SHIELD head came to him in an odd way. “When I was a kid, he was a white guy with a patch and a cigar, and played by David Hasselhoff for a minute,” he laughed. “I went into a comic book store one day and all of a sudden, there was my face with the eyepatch on. I said, ‘I don’t remember saying anybody could use my image for Nick Fury.’ ”
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He then got a call from his manager saying that they planned on making Avengers movies and hoped he would be interested in taking the role. “It was like, ‘Yeah, I think so!'”
Jackson described Nick Fury as “a warrior — a fighter, a scrapper. He’s been in the dark world, the shadow world, spies and everywhere else, which is where he met Natalia,” aka the Black Widow, played by Scarlett Johansson. In the sequel, “We finally follow him to work. We finally go to the office with Nick!”
Jackson also told Roberts that he bonded with new scene partner Robert Redford over a round of golf before shooting. “When we got in the room, it was like we were old friends.”
Watch the clip below.
Email: Ashley.Lee@THR.com
Twitter: @cashleelee
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