Hollywood superstar Samuel L Jackson spent a month in urine-soaked water while filming one of his popular ‘90s blockbusters.
This grim fact was revealed by the 76-year-old Pulp Fiction actor and the movie’s director, Renny Harlin.
The pair collaborated on 1999 sci-fi horror flick Deep Blue Sea, which gave Jackson one of his most memorable onscreen deaths, when he is the surprise first victim of the film’s killer shark.
Deep Blue Sea is set in an isolated underwater facility, where Dr. Susan McAlester (Saffron Burrows) is harvesting the brain tissue of DNA-altered sharks as a possible cure for Alzheimer’s disease.
But when backers send an executive (Jackson) to investigate the experiments, a routine procedure goes awry, resulting in a shark attack.
Suddenly, there are multiple genetically engineered sharks on the loose, flooding the facility, and their human captors must race to stop them escaping into the ocean and breeding.
‘I had no idea I was going to be as wet as I was. I was in water for a month: it was kind of wild,’ Marvel stalwart Jackson told The Guardian of his experience filming Deep Blue Sea.
He also recalled that it involved ‘dumping water down on us from towers, like big-ass waves flying everywhere’.
‘After Stellan Skarsgård has his arm bitten off and we’re out on the deck trying to get him on the helicopter, we didn’t know they were going to throw that much water. The rehearsals had been very different,’ he added.
It was then left to filmmaker Harlin to reveal the gruesome truth of all that water the cast, crew and Jackson were swimming in, in the tanks that had been built for Titanic at Baja Studios in Mexico, where sets could be sunk on a hydraulic platform.
‘We had hundreds of crew and cast working in wetsuits, and for the first week everyone would religiously get out of the tank whenever they needed to go to the bathroom,’ he told the publication.
‘But it’s horrible climbing in and out of a cold wetsuit, and by the second week, people only seemed to leave the pool for lunch. By then, it had become a giant tank of urine.’
Also swimming in this delicious tank were LL Cool J, Michael Rapaport and Thomas Jane.
Deep Blue Sea made $165million worldwide and was considered pretty successful in a popular horror sub-genre that is dominated by Steven Spielberg’s 1975 classic Jaws.
On review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, Deep Blue Sea managed a respectable 60% from critics, where reviews branded it a ‘cult favourite’, ‘the finest unabashedly campy B-movie of the ’90s’ and ‘a gory, trashy blockbuster that succeeds’.
Two belated direct-to-video sequels swam to the surface in recent years with Deep Blue Sea 2 in 2018 and – you guessed it – Deep Blue Sea 3 in 2020.
Last year, Netflix’s shark attack film Under Paris took the streaming charts by storm, becoming one of the platform’s most watched films not in the English language in a matter of days.
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