How John McClane led to Nick Fury being an MCU staple

I’m here to talk to you about Nakatomi Plaza…Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Willis shared credits on numerous movies, whether they appeared onscreen together or not: Pulp Fiction, M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable and Glass, National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon 1…But the dynamic is in full force in 1995’s Die Hard with a Vengeance. And it was here that Willis gave advice that inadvertently led to a fan-favorite character: Nick Fury.

Jackson recently recalled working with Willis on Die Hard with a Vengeance, joining John McClane as Zeus, an electrician who gets pulled into the hero’s attempts to thwart Simon Peter Gruber. During that time – in which they presumably also bonded over the power of delivering a good “motherf*cker” on the big screen – Willis told his co-star that franchise characters would be the path to solidifying his reputation. “He told me, ‘Hopefully you’ll be able to find a character that, when you make bad movies and they don’t make any money, you can always go back to this character everybody loves. He said, ‘Arnold’s got Terminator. Sylvester’s got Rocky, Rambo. I’ve got John McClane.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, okay.’ And it didn’t occur to me until I got that Nick Fury role – and I had a nine-picture deal to be Nick Fury – that, Oh, I’m doing what Bruce said. I’ve got this character now.”

But Jackson has taken it much farther than any of those action heroes, playing Nick Fury in nearly a dozen (or a third of) movies in the MCU, along with a handful of shows. Compare that with Schwarzenegger and Willis’ five outings as The Terminator and John McClane, and Stallone’s eight at Rocky Balboa, and it’s pretty obvious that Jackson took Willis’ tips to heart – and the bank.

Bruce Willis – who played John McClane for the final time in 2013’s A Good Day to Die Hard, 25 years after introducing moviegoers to the tanktopped hero – recently celebrated his 70th birthday, an occasion marked and celebrated by his family across social media.

Where would you rank Die Hard with a Vengeance in the series? Drop your definitive ranking in the comments section below.

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