Samuel L. Jackson Says George Lucas Is ‘OK’ With Mace Windu Still Being Alive

Samuel L. Jackson has had several iconic roles over the years, and some of the characters meet less-than-perfect fates, but one of those deaths still sticks in his craw.

Jackson claims he brought up the fate of his Star Wars character to George Lucas once because he believes he shouldn’t have been killed off. In fact, he thinks the man in question–Mace Windu–is still alive.

“In my mind I’m not dead. Jedis can fall incredibly high distances and not die…Jedis can fall from amazing distances and there’s a long history of one-armed, one-handed Jedis,” Jackson said in reply to a fan on social media.

Jackson says he brought up the idea to Lucas, who said, “I’m OK with that. You can be alive.”

Not everyone is okay with the idea of bringing back Windu, however, as many hardcore Star Wars fans take issue with much of the characters and writing in Episodes 1-3. Even with an actor as beloved as Samuel L. Jackson — who can take any role and make it his own, no matter how wild — the films just weren’t received well, and many feel that Windu didn’t get the lines he deserved. As The Guardian‘s Ben Child writes, the Tarzan actor would have been put to better use as a villain.

“Windu’s lines could have been spoken by any of the grey, underwritten members of the prequels’ hideously tedious Jedi council…and that’s because Windu is yet another example of the late-era Lucas penchant for insipidly written identikit characters who exist largely for the purposes of exposition. Windu may have had a few decent lightsaber battles – Jackson was none-too impressed with the quality of Rey and Kylo Ren’s laser sword spats in new episode The Force Awakens – but he is otherwise instantly forgettable,” Child wrote.

Samuel L. Jackson can pretty much pick and choose his roles at this point, so it’s not hard to believe that Mace Windu could pop back up in a future film. But it hasn’t always been so easy for the actor; Jackson has been open for years about his battle with substance abuse, saying that when he was at his worst, his family really backed him up and supported him so that he could follow his dreams.

“They found me passed out on the floor after I left somebody’s bachelor party. Put my a** in rehab the next day, and supported me and pushed me and give me a reason to get up and go and chase it day after day after day…I was a f**king drug addict and I was out of my mind a lot of the time, but I had a good reputation…I was doing Pulitzer-Prize-winning plays. I was working with people who made me better, who challenged me. So I was doing things the right way, it was just that one thing that was in the way — my addiction,” Samuel told The Guardian.

Jackson says he owes part of his success to his wife, LaTanya, who helped him see that he needed to stop looking for reactions from the audience when he was on stage and focus on building relationships with the characters instead. After that, he says, he was finally able to become the actor he wanted to be.

Samuel L. Jackson says that he knows he owes at least some of his popularity as a film actor to Quentin Tarantino, who wrote the part of Jules in Pulp Fiction. Some fans say the film made Samuel L. Jackson a household name.

“After Jules, I became the coolest motherf**ker on the planet. Why? I have no clue. I’m not like Jules. It’s called being an actor.”

[Photo by Jamie McCarthy / Getty Images]