Samuel L. Jackson finds a personal connection in The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

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When Samuel L. Jackson took on the title role in the AppleTV+ limited series The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, it wasn’t just the chance to work with a writer he admired. (Walter Mosley has adapted his 2010 novel for the screen.) Nor was it solely to play a frail old man with dementia, a type of role we haven’t seen from him before. There was a very personal component to the decision as well.

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Dementia runs in his family, Jackson explains. “Reading the story way back when, I was already in the middle of dealing with my mom and her brother and her sister. My grandfather had already passed. So that was happening. And reading the story [I was] immediately feeling a connection to Ptolemy because of it.”

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Painful though that was, it helped him play a 93-year-old who was confused and sometimes angry at that confusion, because he’d seen it play out in front of him.

“To get into the headspace of Ptolemy, particularly when he’s at his most confused?” says Jackson. “I had been there and experienced it first hand in terms of having conversations … or trying to have a conversation. Trying to engage a person who was desperately trying to not only understand what you were saying, but understand who you were. And seeing that look on their faces, or the frustration of not being able to answer a question that they know they know the answer to.”

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The 73-year-old says he’ll even catch himself in a senior moment from time to time. “I have that now when I’m trying to remember something. I go, ‘I know I know the answer to it!’ And it’s frustrating as all hell. Or you walk into a room and you can’t remember why you walked in there, and you say to yourself: Oh my God is it getting ready to happen?”

Not much to do about it, he adds, except keep on working, learning lines and doing what he does. “But it’s still a thought. It’s still a concern sometimes.”

Scientists continue to search for a way to stop the ravages of dementia, but The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey imagines a miracle treatment that offers Jackson’s character a short period of intense mental clarity, but with a steep price. Still, he goes ahead with the treatment as a way to remember important details in his life, to tie up some loose ends, and possibly to solve the mystery of the death of a family member. “Everybody wants answers and everybody wants closure,” Jackson says.

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He held the rights to The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey for some time, with the plan to adapt it into a feature film. But he says a 90-minute or two-hour version of the story would never work.

Then, he says, “the streaming services came in, and people started sitting at home bingeing whole series.” That’s when the format revealed itself. Jackson says he pushed for eight episodes, but ultimately settled for six.

“If you do six, we can probably tell the story,” he remembers thinking. “We can flesh it out, and people can meet the people on the inside of it and get a better understanding of who this man was and what his life actually meant to him. It’s not an extraordinary life, but it’s a life well lived.”

The moral of elder care is a minor theme in the series, but one Jackson takes seriously. As The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey opens, his character is locked away inside himself, but he is also marginalized by those around him, with a few notable exceptions. Dominique Fishback stars as Robyn, a friend of the family who becomes his caregiver, reluctantly at first and then out of a growing sense of duty, devotion and even love.

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“Ptolemy is a person that has lived a full, rich life, who finds himself isolated toward the end,” says Jackson, who cautions against letting that happen in real life. “If they were loving companions and people who contributed to your well-being, that cheered for you, that made sure you were nurtured and cared for, then you owe them that at that particular time of their lives, and you honour them by taking care of them and nurturing them.”

He continues: “Hopefully we’ll look at this particular series and people will see that that’s not a person to be thrown away, but a person to be cared for.”

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey is streaming now on AppleTV+ with the first three episodes available now, and the final three released on March 25, April 1 and April 8.