At first it’s surprising that the highest grossing box office actor of all time isn’t someone like John Wayne or Arnold Schwarzenegger, but Samuel L. Jackson.
After all, Jackson himself has never really carried many movies all on his own in the same way the Duke and the Terminator have. But once you start to think about it, with the sheer amount of movies that Jackson has appeared in over his nearly forty-year career it’s almost a given that Jackson has been declared the highest-grossing actor of all time by the Guinness Book of World Records with his collective films grossing an astronomical $7.42 billion!
After all, some of the films Jackson has appeared in include the three Star Wars prequels, his recurring role as Nick Fury in the Marvel Universe films, cameos in Quentin Tarantino‘s films, and lending his voice to Pixar’s The Incredibles. While many of those roles are cameos and would be difficult to attribute to Jackson alone — he’s actually hasn’t had two dozen lead roles — Jackson seems to be the magic ingredient to making a film a hit (except, of course, if that film is Snakes on a Plane).
Jackson — who has appeared in over 100 films since his 1991 breakthrough in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever — has reached that milestone simply because of how prolific he is. As Jackson said in an interview with CBS News (which Daily Actor previously covered), “I grew up in a working class family. When I was a kid, all the adults in my house got up and went to work every day. I assumed that’s what grown people do. That’s what I do. I just happen to have a very interesting job that’s kind of cool!”
