Jamie Foxx spilled details about how Samuel L. Jackson pushed Leonardo DiCaprio to deliver his controversial lines in Django Unchained.
In a Vanity Fair video looking back at his Django role, Foxx recalled DiCaprio’s struggle with his character Calvin Candie’s racist language. “We’re doing a read and Leo says, ‘Hey, guys. Cut! I just can’t do this. This is not me.'”
“Samuel L. Jackson goes, ‘Say that shit, motherfucker! It’s just another Tuesday. Fuck them,'” Foxx shared.
“I told Leo that in slavery days we would never talk to each other,” Foxx continued. “I’m not your friend. I’m not Jamie Foxx. I’m Django. And I told him, you won’t really be able to play that character until you understand what slavery is about. It was tough. it was a horrific. So the next day I see Leo and I say what’s up to him. He don’t speak to me. He’s ready. Everybody started digging in.”
Jackson took a similar hardcore approach with his own character Stephen, telling GQ in September about his chat with director Quentin Tarantino.
“When I finished reading it and I said, ‘That’s what you want me to be?’ It’s on the page, but you haven’t seen him,'” Jackson remembered. “‘You’ve just written him. You haven’t seen him. So, are you ready for what this is gonna be? And he was like, ‘Whatever you bring, bring it!’ So, I brought it.”
Jackson made Stephen so evil that Tarantino worried about keeping certain cut scenes that might make audiences hate Jackson.
Jackson pushed back: “C’mon man, you backing out of your own shit? This is your shit and you don’t wanna do it. I’m willing. I’m here doing it. This is the story, let’s get it.”
In a 2022 chat with The Times, Jackson remembered teaming up with Tarantino to help DiCaprio get comfortable with his character’s racist language. He also stood up for Tarantino’s use of the N-word in his films.
“While we were rehearsing [the slave movie] Django Unchained, Leo [DiCaprio] said, ‘I don’t know if I can say ‘n*‘ this many times.’ Me and Quentin said that you have to,” he shared. “Every time someone wants an example of overuse of the n-word, they go to Quentin — it’s unfair. He’s just telling the story and the characters do talk like that. When Steve McQueen does it, it’s art. He’s an artiste. Quentin’s just a popcorn film-maker.”
Foxx backed this up in 2018, telling Yahoo Entertainment he wasn’t bothered by how often the word appeared in the film. “I understood the text,” he said. “The N-word was said 100 times, but I understood the text — that’s the way it was back in that time.”
