Warning: Spoilers for Split follow, so turn back now if you haven’t seen it yet.
M. Night Shyamalan‘s 2017 psychological thriller Split has one of the most surprising endings of the past decade, stealthily setting up an unexpected sequel that fans have been wanting for years. And though he wasn’t directly involved with Split, Unbreakable star Samuel L. Jackson was just as surprised at Split’s ending as we were. Read his reaction to the movie’s shocking reveal below.
Samuel L. Jackson Split Reaction
Split follows a young girl (Anya Taylor-Joy) who’s kidnapped by “Kevin” (James McAvoy), a man suffering from dissociative identity disorder and who has 23 distinct personalities battling for space in his head. We thought the movie ended with the girl escaping and “Kevin” surviving an intense underground fight sequence, but then there’s a quick extra scene that completely changes everything we saw before:
Mic drop. The movie was set in the Unbreakable universe the whole time! The key characters of this universe – Bruce Willis‘s superhero David Dunn, Samuel L. Jackson’s supervillain Elijah Price/Mr. Glass, McAvoy’s Kevin/The Horde, and Taylor-Joy’s Casey Cooke – will return in Glass, the Unbreakable sequel fans have been clamoring for since 2001. But to hear Samuel L. Jackson tell it, he had no idea this was coming.
In an interview with Vulture, Jackson explains how he found out about the sequel:
“I remember when Night called me last year to say, ‘I need you to watch this movie I just made, and after you watch it, I’ll tell you what I’m thinking.’ So I watched Split, and at the end of it, we get Bruce in the café and the woman talks to him about Mr. Glass.” Jackson gasps in surprise, recalling the moment. “I was like, ‘So are we gonna make this movie?’ And Night says, ‘Well, it depends on the opening weekend.’”
Split’s $ 40 million opening weekend ended up being good enough to warrant this long-awaited sequel, which will pit Dunn against The Horde with Mr. Glass somewhere in between:
“All of a sudden, my character has the thing he wanted: the heroic good guy, the bad guy, and I get to be in the middle of them,” Jackson said. “It has a distinct satisfaction if you remember what his theory was all along, that there are people out here with extraordinary powers who can do extraordinary things. And it’s amazing to watch James have an argument with four different characters in front of my face.”
Aside from Split’s surprise ending, McAvoy’s towering performance is definitely the most notable thing about it, so I’m very much looking forward to seeing more of him playing multiple characters in the same body when Glass hits theaters on January 18, 2019.
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