Entertainment Weekly, August 7, 1998

We tend to think of big summer-movie casting decisions as the executive-suite whims of Evian-swigging, Gucci-suited slick Willies. "Give me Bruce Willis and Harrison Ford, stat!" Or, even more cynically, as the cold-blooded, soulless, demographically approved calculations of those same studios' number crunchers. "The 18-to-34s loooove Brad Pitt!"

But casting The Negotiator didn't work that way at all. Which, of course, you may have already guessed, since Samuel L. Jackson and Kevin Spacey aren't exactly thousand-watt marquee attractions. What's more, the teaming seems . . . well, it just seems too damn smart.

Actually, the whole thing went down like this: Spacey and Jackson bumped into each other at a party the night before Spacey snagged his Best Supporting Actor Oscar for 1995's The Usual Suspects. Mutual fans since back in the days when they were both semi-anonymous struggling New York stage actors, and having recently shot an all-too-brief courtroom tête-à-tête in A Time to Kill, Spacey and Jackson cast The Negotiator themselves, then and there.

"We were just getting warmed up by the time A Time to Kill was over," recalls Jackson. "So when I saw him at the party I said, 'So, Kevin, are you reading The Negotiator?' And he says, 'Yeah.' And I said, 'And???' And he says, 'I'll do it if you do it.' And I said, 'Well, hell, I'll do it if you do it!" And that was that."

After seeing Spacey and Jackson toy with each other as dueling Chicago hostage negotiators in their new cat-and-mouse thriller, it's hard to wrap your head around the fact that it was originally hatched as a Sylvester Stallone flick. In other words, it was a Kurt Russell away from becoming Tango & Cash, Part Duh. Instead, thankfully, it features a pair of guys who've got more chops than a well-stocked butcher shop. But, as Spacey and Jackson will be the first to tell you, for some reason they're still not seen as, quote unquote, movie stars.

"I don't think Hollywood sees me as an opening-weekend-guarantee guy, even though I've been in some movies that have made a lot of money," says Jackson, 49. "Even with the success of A Time to Kill, they still see it as a Sandra Bullock movie." Adds the 39-year-old Spacey a bit more pointedly: "Quite frankly, a lot of movie stars play themselves because that's what they're expected to do, and on some level that's what they can do . . .If I was only interested in making dough and being famous, I could show up in every movie and do the same thing with my eyes closed. But I'd be bored and eventually lose my credibility because audiences would go, 'What ever happened to him? He was interesting about four years ago.'"

Instead, what Spacey and Jackson are is a part of a small and elite group of actors with a capital A. Sure, maybe Ritalin-popping kids aren't drooling for the Sam Jackson action figure or the Kevin Spacey Extra Value Meal. But these guys are simply two of the pound-for-pound best actors working today. "The bad news is maybe they won't get as rich as some people," admits Kill director Joel Schumacher. "The good news is they're going to work till the day they die. There'll always be great roles for them."

"Nobody ever believed he was real. Nobody knew him or saw anybody ever that worked directly for him. You never knew--that was his power."
---VERBAL KINT IN THE USUAL SUSPECTS

Yes, Spacey's timid, shuffling onscreen alter ego is talking about Keyser Söze--who, of course, turns out to be him when he pulls back Oz's curtain at the end of the film. But he could just as easily be talking about Kevin Spacey. Like all of the best actors, with Spacey there is no there there. He's a human Escher print on celluloid. We can't pin him down. Hell, we don't want to pin him down because that would take all the fun out of watching him work his on-screen mojo.

As a result, he's often pretty damn creepy. Ever since he first crossed over from being what Jackson teasingly calls "this Juilliard guy" with the short-lived late-'80s TV show Wiseguy, Spacey's cobbled together a crazy-quilt resume of compellingly strange parts that have created a schizophrenic whole. Whether playing a blustery and abusive red-meat Hollywood exec in Swimming With Sharks (1994), a Southern gentleman dripping with deadly Savannah charm in last year's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, a wigged-out doomsday-preaching psycho killer in Seven (1995), or The Usual Suspects' calculating puppet master, Spacey is a complete phantom.

"Seven's a perfect example," says Jackson. "One of the best actors in Hollywood is in that film, Morgan Freeman . . . But Kevin raises the stakes. Hell, he steals the show. And he does the same thing in The Usual Suspects. It could have been just another quirky film. Without Kevin, Keyser Söze doesn't work."

Jackson--an M-80 of an actor--knows more than a little something about making movies work. Even as a kid, Jackson took acting seriously . . . maybe a bit too seriously. "When we used to play war, I was always hooked up," says Jackson. "One time I took ketchup and bloodied up some Kotex pads and wrapped them around my head, and all the old ladies in the neighborhood were chasing me around, yelling 'Get that off! . . . I feel like that's still what we should do."

It's almost too easy to put Jackson's performance in Pulp Fiction on a Greatest Actors highlight reel. After watching Jules, the Jheri-curled, Ezekiel-spouting hitman who knows all about erotic foot massage, you almost muttered "S- - -!" along with Jackson when he got robbed of a supporting-actor statuette in 1995. "I think Sam should have won the Academy Award at least five times already," says Schumacher. "The first time I saw him was in Jungle Fever, where he played a crack addict. And having been a recovering addict myself, I mean he was there.

Then again, Jackson also specializes in the kind of non-showy roles that never win Oscars. Take his turn in A Time to Kill. What could have easily been the standard Grisham-by-the-numbers performance becomes an intense slow boil of a father's almost biblical thirst for vengeance for his daughter's rape. "Well, that was a pretty easy skin to walk in," says Jackson. "I have a 16-year-old daughter."

When pressed to find a flaw with Jackson, Spacey sinks into silence. Finally, he says that Jackson tends to blow costars out of the water. Well, most costars. "Look here," says Spacey in mock outrage, "If you don't think I can go toe-to-toe with Mr. Jackson, you haven't been paying attention."

By Chris Nashawaty; Entertainment Weekly, August 7, 1998