‘He’s a mysterious character’

Hollywood veteran Samuel L Jackson gets candid on his role in the upcoming movie Jumper

On his character
“He’s sort of a mysterious character, we’re not sure who he works for because every time you see him, he says he works for somebody else, some alphabet agency of the government. We do know that he has a raison d’etre, which is to kill Jumpers, no matter what age, and no matter where they are, he’s seeking them out and trying to kill them.”

On the potential iconic nature of his character
“You’d like to think that this character will have an iconic quality at some point, that when people look back at the film, they’ll go, wow, that Agent Roland was straight ahead, almost like the terminator or any of those other guys that come to a place and have a purpose. You know that because you see, and you see he has a family, you know he has a family history, that his great-great grandfather, and his grandfather and his grandmother, and his aunts and uncles, and everybody have been Paladins that have chased Jumpers. So, apparently there’s a bigger story about the conflict between Paladins and Jumpers than we’ve actually touched on right now.”

On the role of ‘Paladins’ in the story
“We don’t know if these people are really heroes, right now they appear to be villains, but they may end up beinf heroes at some point because we are not really sure what he Jumpers are capable of and what they turn into, because they haven’t reached that point.”

On director Doug Liman
“I think Doug is a very unique individual in that he sees this film in so many different ways at one particular instant, it’s almost like he’s a Jumper in his mind, he jumps from here to there to there to there, and then back into a space. A lot of times he’s just hovering in this limbo sort of space that he asks you come in and start talking about it and dealing with it, and he’ll ask an interesting and philosophical question that has pretty much nothing to do with what you’re doing, that leads you to an interesting space in the actual doing of the scene. So I’ve a great time doing that with him.”

On the physical challenges of the role
“You know, there’s running, there’s jumping, there’s kicking, there’s swinging, fighting, falling, jumping off high spaces and landing on things, and old knees. It’s challenging and being on fire, watching other people do fire things, and having to fight somebody that has the abilities of a Griffin or a David, and sometimes there are three people in a scene being one person that I’m fighting at once, so I have to fight them from every corner posible and yes I can say that it has been pretty challenging.”