Samuel L. Jackson
Actor
The highest-grossing actor in film history (Pulp Fiction, Marvel’s Nick Fury), who has spent years striking AI-friendly language from his contracts — whenever one says “in perpetuity” or “known and unknown,” he crosses it out.
In his words
Future actors should do what I always do when I get a contract, and it has the words “in perpetuity” and “known and unknown” on it: I cross that shit out.
Biography
Samuel L. Jackson (born 1948) is by many counts the highest-grossing actor of all time, from Pulp Fiction to more than a decade as Nick Fury in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Few performers have more digital versions of themselves in studio vaults — and few have policed them longer.
Crossing it out
Jackson was first body-scanned by George Lucas for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and as Fury he is rescanned with every costume change. After Marvel digitally de-aged him for Captain Marvel (2019), he grew pointed about what studios could eventually do with all that data. In a June 2023 Rolling Stone interview — published as the industry hurtled toward the strikes — he advised future actors to do what he always does when a contract contains the words “in perpetuity” or “known and unknown”: cross that language out before signing.
The warning was prescient: months later, digital-replica consent became a central demand of the SAG-AFTRA strike, and the union’s 2023 contract now requires explicit consent and compensation for creating or reusing a performer’s digital likeness.
Jackson’s stance is practical rather than ideological — he keeps working on effects-heavy franchises that use scanning constantly. His objection is to open-ended rights grabs: language that would let a studio deploy his face and voice forever, in media that does not yet exist, without asking again or paying again.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/samuel-l-jackson