Samuel L. Jackson was in on the MCU from the very beginning, debuting his take on Nick Fury in the bumper to the original Iron Man. The acclaimed actor, who says he hasn’t cared about scoring an Oscar in ages (though he now has one), has become one of the experts on cinema’s current most popular genre. So when an actress he’d worked with when she was a kid asked him how it’s done, he naturally did his best to help. But his advice was predictably over-the-top.
Jurnee Smollett, who played the title role in the 1997 drama Eve’s Bayou when she was about 10, grew up to appear in acclaimed shows, like Friday Night Lights, True Blood, Underground, and Lovecraft Country. A few years back, she nabbed the role of Black Canary in Birds of Prey, the second film to feature Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn. When she got the gig, she told The Hollywood Reporter (in a bit teased out by /Film), she reached out to Jackson, whom she called one of her “mentors.”
“I remember calling [Jackson] and being like, ‘OK, so like, yo, what do I do? Is there a way in which I should approach this any differently than how I would approach any other character? I always do so much research of the world,’” she recalled. “And he said, ‘Baby, just go and piss on your territory.’”
Looks like the advice worked: Smollett is set to reprise Black Canary in both the film Batgirl and her own spin-off of the same name. So if you ever need some unusual yet helpful advice, just reach out to Mr. Jackson.