Samuel L Jackson: The fast and the furious

Samuel L Jackson, in the flesh, looks nothing like he does on screen. Often scarily intense (Pulp Fiction, XXX), he can also do super cool (Shaft); other-worldly (Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones); not to mention ashen and drear (A Time To Kill, Jurassic Park, and now Changing Lanes). But in person, with his Lucy Liu eyes, and unlined baby skin, this 54-year-old actor is just jaw-droppingly pretty.

Ensconced in a room in the Dorchester hotel, dressed in dark colours from beret to toe, he's drumming rather frantically on the coffee-table as I enter. Only to snap smoothly to attention. "How's your day going?" He points at my hairband, "that's kind of bright for a rainy day." I tell him I'm trying to perk myself up. "Well," he drawls, "you've done a good job."

Interviewers tend to find Jackson charming. When he's not putting them down (one journalist asked what the "L" stood for, "Gee," he said, "haven't you done your research?") He's always been open about his personal life, particularly his addiction to drugs. A bit-part actor for years, he cleaned up his act, so the legend goes, two weeks before playing a crack addict in Spike Lee's Jungle Fever, the 1991 film which made his name. In Changing Lanes he's brilliant again as another casualty, this time of alcohol (see Anthony Quinn's review). I almost dread bringing the subject up. His goodwill seems so obviously tinged with boredom. I wonder if he'll just yawn in my face.

In fact, he raises the issue himself. He says his "chaotic" character, blue-collar worker Doyle Gipson, is a man who says one thing, and does another. "I understand it, because I've done it. He's trying to stay sober for his wife and kids." He leans forward. "But you're the one you've got to care about. If he's getting sober so his wife won't leave town, and she says she's leaving, then you've got an excuse to drink." (Jackson seems unable to decide whether to use "you" or "he". He may not even be aware of the difference).

In Changing Lanes, Doyle becomes increasingly caught up in a battle with a yuppie lawyer, Gavin Banek, (Ben Affleck) whose car collides with his. Anger becomes a substitute for drink, and the impact of this on his two young sons makes your throat go tight.

I point out that Jackson's one daughter, Zoe (currently studying at Vassar college), was nine when he finally quit drugs. He shrugs. "This is definitely a sort of interesting family dilemma. A lot of men in my family were alcoholics – it's a genetic thing, you just do things to excess. I've never had one beer a day. It's just not the way I drink. I drink until it's all gone." He laughs. "She [Zoe] has been talked to about it. And I've been with her, when she's had champagne and wine. I tell her, 'there are certain signs that will let you know that you may have what I have. Like if you drink too much and you don't remember where you parked your car, or just black out.'" He shrugs again. "You just give them the information. That's all you can do."

Jackson was brought up by grandparents, aunts and uncles, and later his mother, in Chattanooga, Tennessee (his mother's still alive, and spends every Christmas and summer at Jackson's home in LA). His father, who he hardly saw at all, died of cirrhosis some years ago. I ask if this was devastating, and Jackson pulls a scornful face. "No! It wasn't devastating, I just thought, that could have happened to me." Excessive drinking, excessive sentiment – he's got no time for either.

He says that the ending of Changing Lanes is "very nice now", but that in the original ending, Doyle's wife left him. "Yeah, she just took those kids. Which is what happens, you know. Life works that way." When they test screened the film, however, audiences were appalled. "They said, 'Please give us some kind of hope.'"

I ask if anything was changed about the final scene between Doyle and Gavin, in which the latter gets a big speech, and Doyle sits on the couch listening patiently. Something about it, I say, feels wrong.

Jackson nods, but claims he was never convinced by Gavin's fate, in any of the versions. Originally, the two men begin fighting all over again, this time physically, and then Gavin makes a decision about a crucial bit of paper that may well cause his rich colleagues to end up in jail.

"The reality," says Jackson, "as we all now know – because we've had all these scandals, with all these corporations and the CEOs – would probably be very different. I always said he'd just go ahead and bite the bullet and turn the paper in and keep his lifestyle. Like we know they do. He'd become one of those guys."

Forget black family reunions, or white yuppie redemption. In Jackson's opinion, the film's final shot should be Doyle at the window, ironing his shirt, alone. We wouldn't know what was going to happen to him, just that life goes on. "It would have been more devastating, but it would have been more real."

Jackson's a cynical, politicised man. He's irreverent, too. When I say that Affleck is good at playing obnoxious, he roars with laughter. He chuckles, too, as he mentions the bad editing on many of his films, which means that crucial scenes get left out, ensuring other parts make no sense. And notes with a smile how scriptwriters write "speeches", which he has to rearrange so they sound like "conversations". I ask what Spike Lee (an old friend, and sometimes enemy, of Jackson's) thinks of Changing Lanes, and he clucks his tongue. "I haven't seen him to find out, but I'm sure he's seen it." So he probably has an opinion about it? "Oh," another mock tut, "he has an opinion about everything, I'm sure."

He says he's more interested in feedback from the acting community in LA, and his wife's church community, then quickly makes clear that he rarely goes to church, "I pray, but I just do it by myself." Being on the outside, clearly, is the thing that suits him best.

What he doesn't want to appear is angry. When I ask him when he last lost his temper he shifts around in his seat and breaks eye contact for the first time. "Jeez" he finally says, "that's kind of hard for me to say. I'm not confrontational any more."

He hooks his finger beneath his beret and gives his scalp a good scratch. "Let's see, the last time was over a year ago, on a movie set that I wasn't particularly having great fun on." A big laugh. "I don't like for people to make my job, or workplace unpleasant. And when people make it difficult, or don't know what they're doing and create chaos, then that really makes me angry."

He thinks this is basically OK, because it happens so rarely, and he even takes some proud in his power. "Some actors are difficult about everything, so people think, oh, let's ignore him, he's just an arsehole. People pay attention when I do it." But then he seems to change his mind. "The thing is, anger is wasted energy. It generally doesn't end up on a cheerful note, or you don't solve the problem anyway. You just end up a lot angrier."

Another vigorous scratch of the head. "I mean, I play golf. And there are lots of guys out there who I play with who lose their tempers. I'm like why? Why are you throwing the golf club, why are you slamming the glove around? Cos you're angry about something that you probably couldn't do anyway. It's not like you do it for a living..."

Acting, of course, is what Jackson does for a living. He's determined, though, not to let the vagaries of the Hollywood system, or movie-goers, get to him. You could say there's quite a lot at stake.

I say I've been told that he has a stammer, and that I couldn't believe this was true. He makes a face. "Sometimes, if I try and talk too fast, or if I get anxious, or passionate, I'll get caught on words. So I have to slow down and take a deep breath..."

Having a stammer is sweet, I say. "No", he gulps for a second, "it's not, it's annoying!" He points to himself. "Oh, well, there it is. You ask about it and it shows up.

"When I was a kid," he explains, "I would talk and people would laugh, so I just stopped talking for a while." He's an only child, and while he says only children "end up pretty independent", he admits he often felt very alone. "But then I got my therapy and learnt how to breathe, so it got better. But I'm not the only one. James Earl Jones [the voice of Darth Vader] had the same problem."

And yet Jackson is famous for his quick speeches, those tongue-twisters, for example, delivered by his character, Ordell Robbi, in Jackie Brown. He sighs and nods. "Rapid-fire kind of speeches, yeah...You learn to control it, in a way. But that's not excitement, that's control, and acting".

I haven't been able to hear the stammer till this point, but suddenly it becomes noticeable. "It's, it's kind of bizarre," he says. "It's, it's one of those things. If my character doesn't stutter, stutter, then I don't – but if it's Sam, it happens.

"It's like when I did The Caveman's Valentine," he muses, "[a film not yet released in Britain], the character stuttered. And," he takes a deep, long breath, "some days it was really hard to stop. Because he was a paranoid schizophrenic, kind of like [he does a mime]. He talked like that, and it was kind of hard to get rid of some days."

It's time to go. Instead of moving to shake my hand, he walks to the window and looks out at the pouring rain.

Samuel L Jackson has a lot of things he's trying to shake off. And a fierce determination to stay in control. Such an urge could be stultifying – even deadly. In his case, it seems terribly sane.