Samuel L. Jackson isn’t buying Joe Rogan‘s apology for using the N-word. In a recent interview with The Times, Jackson said, “He is saying nobody understood the context when he said it. But he shouldn’t have said it. It’s not the context, dude — it’s that he was comfortable doing it. Say that you’re sorry because you want to keep your money, but you were having fun and you say you did it because it was entertaining.”
Rogan posted a five-minute apology to Instagram on February 5th after singer Indie Arie released a compilation of the podcaster repeatedly using the word.
In his interview with The Times, Jackson also segued into Quentin Tarantino‘s use of the word. “It needs to be an element of what the story is about. A story is context — but just to elicit a laugh? That’s wrong. Every time someone wants an example of overuse of the N-word, they go to Quentin — it’s unfair. He’s just telling the story and the characters do talk like that. When Steve McQueen does it with 12 Years a Slave, it’s art. He’s an artiste. Quentin’s just a popcorn filmmaker,” he said.
Along these lines, the Pulp Fiction actor also told Esquire in 2019, “You can’t just tell a writer he can’t talk, write the words, put the words in the mouths of the people from their ethnicities, the way that they use their words. You cannot do that, because then it becomes an untruth; it’s not honest. It’s just not honest.”