“Any time you cast Sam, that’s the first thing you say—what’s his hair gonna be like?” director Spike Lee recently told JoBlo. Indeed, no actor takes more liberties with their onscreen hair than Samuel L. Jackson. Whether it’s the Jheri curl ’do he sported as a hitman in Pulp Fiction or some gross dreadlocks in The Caveman’s Valentine, the biggest identifier for the wide array of characters Jackson’s played is the hair. In honor of his role in Spike Lee’s Oldboy, in which he plays an evil jailer with a blond mohawk, The Daily Beast ranks Jackson’s craziest movie hairdos.
In this action-comedy, which was released in 2001 to little fanfare, Jackson plays a pharmacologist by the name of Elmo McElroy (really), who develops a synthetic drug dubbed POS 51, which he claims is 51 times more potent than cocaine. He's a wacky character who, in addition to sporting some mean cornrows, dons a kilt.
This underrated 1998 action-thriller sees Jackson star as Danny Roman, a top police hostage negotiator in Chicago who, after being implicated in an embezzlement scheme, takes several top ranking officials hostage in the Internal Affairs building in order to prove his own innocence. Jackson sports a red Roman haircut, styled similar to George Clooney's ER 'do.
In addition to being the final film of Bernie Mac's and Isaac Hayes's careers, this 2008 musical-comedy also features some fantastic hair. Jackson stars as Louis Hinds, a former backup soul singer who reunites with his partner, Floyd Henderson (Mac), for a reunion concert. There are several hilarious hairdos in the film, but the '70s-era afro takes the cake.
One of Jackson's craziest films—let alone hairdos—is this 2006 drama. Jackson stars as Lazarus, a deeply religious ex-blues guitarist who finds Rae (Christina Ricci), a young nymphomaniac, severely beaten and left for dead on the side of the road. To cure her of her "condition," he chains her to his radiator. In the film, Jackson sports a balding grey head of hair, similar to his 'do in Django Unchained.
In this 2008 sci-fi flick, Jackson plays Roland Cox, the leader of a group known as the Paladins, whose job is to kill jumpers (those who can teleport). Of his tightly-cropped, Sisqo-esque 'do, Jackson told MTV, "We wanted it to be very close, very white, very striking when you see him. In my mind, Roland's sort of timeless. We don't know how old he is. We know he's old, 'cause he's been around, his white hair informs us of that, but he's also very virile and breaks down walls and cracks floors and takes a lot of punishment."
One of the more controversial characters Jackson's played is Stephen, the dedicated house slave to vicious Msr. Calvin Candie in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained. Stephen is feeble and stumbles about with a cane. He also has tufts of white hair emanating from his bald dome, and bushy white eyebrows. He is one scary man.
Before Jackson's Elmo McElroy goes the way of cornrows, he sports a bushy '70s-era afro. The year is 1971 and Elmo, after graduating with a degree in pharmacology, gets pulled over by a cop and busted for smoking marijuana. The arrest dashes Elmo's dream of being a pharmacologist, so he turns to a life of crime. This fantastic afro is even more impressive than his one in Soul Men because it's complimented by a beard and some psychedelic treads.
The only reason to see this regrettable 2008 neo-noir is Jackson's ridiculous hairdo. Jackson plays The Octopus, a former coroner-cum-supervillain who aims to take control of Central City. In every scene, The Octopus sports a completely different look than the one before, and his most outrageous look is a samurai robe and wig.
This remake of the sci-fi cult classic isn't out 'til 2014, but the trailers have already hit the Internet featuring Jackson as Pat Novak, host of a program called The Novak Element and a bigtime advocate of mechanized crime control. In Robocop, Jackson sports a crazy Mitt Romney 'do, ghostly white sideburns and all.
In Spike Lee's remake of the 2003 South Korean revenge thriller, Jackson plays Chaney, the head of a facility that kidnaps and imprisons people for pay. Chaney is a mischievous bastard and, in the film, sports a wild hyper-blond mohawk. "Any time you cast Sam, that's the first thing you say—what's his hair gonna be like?" Lee told JoBlo. "So we came up with something he'd never done before, and Sam liked it too. Sam's very particular about how he looks."
In Quentin Tarantino's underappreciated 1997 heist flick, Jackson plays Ordell Robbie, a black-market gun runner living in Compton. Robbie sports long red hair that he keeps in a ponytail, as well as a braided string of red facial hair that hangs off the tip of his chin. Of the 'do, Jackson told MTV: "OK, now, Quentin kind of fought me on this hair, 'cause he was kind of saying, 'Nobody wears their hair in that 'Super Fly' mode anymore,' and it was kind of passé," Jackson revealed. "I was trying to explain to them that Ordell was kind of stuck in this time frame, this period in his life, and he had just enough money to kind of keep his hair straight, but not enough money to keep it done around the edges. So ... some days [my hairdresser] would put it in two braids, some days he would have it in one French braid in the back. We made up our minds that we were gonna do stuff to it until he got desperate, and then it would be all loose and wild, and kind of jacked up."
In this 2001 mystery film, Jackson plays Romulus Ledbetter (wow), an ex-Juilliard pianist who now lives in a cave in Inwood Park, N.Y. Ledbetter suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, and soon, gets wrapped up in a bizarre murder-mystery. To play up his craziness, Jackson sports some long, dirty, grey dreadlocks that are truly a sight to behold.
In this terrible 1996 sports comedy, Jackson stars as a Don King-esque fight promoter who hypes up a bogus, racially-charged heavyweight bout between champion James "Grim Reaper" Roper (Damon Wayans) and Irishman Terry Conklin (Peter Berg), who once knocked out Roper on the amateur circuit. I mean... look at that hair. Wow.
M. Night Shyamalan's terrific 2000 suspense-thriller sees Jackson play Elijah Price, a comic book fanatic born with Type I osteogenesis imperfecta—a condition that makes his bones break easily. Elijah believes he's the most frail man in the universe, and that there's someone at the opposite end of the spectrum who's "unbreakable." That man is David Dunn, a security guard played by Bruce Willis. It's later revealed (spoiler alert) that Price is a supervillain who's masterminded a series of accidents. So, he's just as crazy as his hairdo. "We were thinking Frederick Douglass," Jackson told MTV. "Big Afro with the part, swooping to the side. Fortunately, we wanted hair that was big and like this [he demonstrates with his hands], and this is what he chose for Elijah. It was cool."
The crazy hairdo that really started it all. In Tarantino's 1994 crime comedy, Jackson plays Jules Winnfield, a nostalgic, philosophical hitman with a penchant for skinny ties and wild Jheri curls, a la Lionel Richie. "Quentin's original idea was that Jules would have a big Afro," Jackson told MTV. "His mistake was, he sent this young white girl to South Central Los Angeles to pick up an Afro wig, and this is what she came back with. And I looked at it and said, 'Oh, this is perfect!' I'm going, 'Remember Ice Cube and Dr. Dre and all those guys had this hair when they were N.W.A. with Eazy-E?' So I put it on and sprayed it with some stuff and was like, 'This is Jules!'"
