Certain actors become well-known for certain things. Some tend to play specific types of roles. Some are known for going to extremes when it comes to method acting. Samuel L. Jackson is known for swearing. Nobody is known for dropping F-bombs quite like Jackson, and somebody recently did the math and calculated that he has actually made more than a million dollars simply from uttering the word “motherfucker”. But the actor himself disagrees with that assessment.
In an image Jackson posted to Instagram Stories the actor responded to a movie trivia account that claimed if one divides up the amount of money Jackson has made from films by the number of words he has said on screen, then counts the number of “motherfuckers” he has said on screen, it adds up to over $1 million. Jackson is not so sure.
It’s an interesting post to say the least, but it appears to have all been for nothing. It implies that somebody sat down and watched all of Samuel L. Jackson’s movies and counted every word that he said, which would have taken weeks if not months of work. They did all this to put together this post which, to be fair, is a pretty funny stat, but then the subject of the post comes in and just shuts it all down.
Honestly, the fact that Samuel L. Jackson has said “motherfucker” on screen more than 1,100 times, if true, is enough of a statistic for me. But it makes one wonder how much other actors get "paid to swear." It's been previously calculated Jonah Hill and Leonardo DiCaprio swear more than Jackson on screen. And it doesn’t even count the times the said the word when the cameras aren’t rolling, as Jackson has said he uses the word “motherfucker” as a way to battle stuttering.
While this is certainly an interesting statistic if it turned out to be true, there are some legitimate questions about some of these numbers. First off, it’s unclear where the number for the total amount of money that Samuel L. Jackson has made came from. Salary numbers are usually not public knowledge, and actors’ income, because studio accounting is a black box, is difficult to quantify. Jackson certainly had some sort of salary for each film, but he may have also had backend money on many films, but exactly what he got paid would be hard to nail down.
And of course this whole exercise only works out if you believe that the only thing actors get paid to do is speak on camera. There’s a lot more that goes into the job of being an actor, especially in the blockbuster movies that Samuel L. Jackson has been making a lot of over the last couple of decades. It doesn’t include the time he’s had to learn fight choreography or sit in a makeup chair for hours on end.
Samuel L. Jackson's next movie on the 2024 release schedule is the animated Garfield movie, where he probably won't say "motherfucker" but I guess we'll have to watch to be sure. Considering both he and Snoop Dogg are in the Garfield cast, one can guess while the word certainly won't make the movie, it's probably in the outtakes.
