Pride of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a former light-heavyweight champ (he last fought on May 29 against Rashad Evans in Las Vegas, a bout Jackson lost in a unanimous decision) - a guy whose day job consists of beating the toughest men in the world into either submission or unconsciousness - Jackson stood in the middle of his trailer spewing invective with a glint of real menace in his eye.
At issue: A movie-crew member had wandered in on this final day of principal photography and - whether jokingly or not - called the muscle-bound movie star a homophobic epithet. Jackson had responded with barely contained fury. He threw the guy out, shouting him down with every conceivable gay slur. "You're a punk!" Jackson finally bellowed.
He claimed the crew member's intent had been to provoke a physical assault.
"That ... wanted me to punch him so he could sue me," the professional body-slammer explained, using a certain 12-letter curse word that he lets fly often in conversation - a word that has no business appearing in a family newspaper and, for the sake of this article, will here on out be substituted with "individual".
But the outburst seemed to also prompt Jackson (31) to wrestle with other issues: his experiences in western Canada, his choice to take time out of the octagon (as the UFC's fighting ring is known) and how his stardom in The A-Team, Fox studios' tent-pole adaptation of the '80s action-comedy series might affect his fighting career.
"Acting is kind of gay," Jackson said. "It makes you soft. You got all these people combing your hair and putting a coat over your shoulders when you're cold. I don't want a coat over my shoulders! I'm a tough-ass [individual]!"Vancouver strikes me as a San Francisco-kind of place," he continued.
"And I don't want [individuals] getting ideas about me. I feel in my heart I'm the toughest [individual] on the planet. And I don't want nothing changing my train of thought. If you don't believe that when we step inside the octagon, it shows."
Jackson's knuckles were adorned with temporary tattoos that he had sported for the duration of the movie's shoot - 72 days of blocking scenes and performing stunts alongside such bona-fide movie stars as Liam Neeson (as team leader Colonel John "Hannibal" Smith) and Bradley Cooper (as smooth-talking lothario Lieutenant Templeton "Faceman" Peck). "P-I-T-Y" read the letters on Jackson's right hand, "F-O-O-L" on the left.
Ladies and gentlemen, meet the new B. A. Baracus.
The story of how Jackson - the most recalcitrant movie star appearing in any blockbuster this summer - came to be cast in The A-Team is a creation myth that begins in 1982.
That year, Rocky star Sylvester Stallone had the good luck to watch a TV game show featuring a toughest bouncer contest and took note of a resplendently Mohawked, Grade-A tough guy. His name: Mr T.
Stallone cast the granite-faced former bodyguard as Rocky's trash-talking nemesis Clubber Lang in Rocky III - "I pity the fool" being Mr T's unforgettable line.
And after the film became a box-office smash, NBC built a hit series, The A-Team, around Mr T.
A winking extravaganza of cartoonish violence and witty repartee that ran from 1983 to '87, it followed four Vietnam vets "convicted of a crime they didn't commit"; they became soldiers of fortune to battle evil on a freelance basis.
And portraying the Special Ops Alpha Unit's snarling enforcer, Sergeant B. A. "Bad Attitude" Baracus, Mr T became a global phenomenon.
In the process, he captured the imagination of one Quinton Jackson from Memphis, Tennessee.
A wrestling prodigy who earned the nickname "Rampage" when he was 8, Jackson parlayed his talents into a lucrative career as a mixed martial arts fighter, first becoming a sensation in Japan's Pride organisation and, later, a superstar in the UFC.
His signature move: the body slam, which Fox Sports Net's "Sport Science" measured as having a "head impact criteria" of 3500 - a hurt index three and a-half times worse than one would typically suffer in a car crash.
Inevitably, Hollywood beckoned but Jackson's fight schedule precluded him from appearing in films, save walk-on parts in schlock fare such as 2008's Midnight Meat Train.
"I've had the chance to do other movie roles before but I took the fights instead," he said. "I was supposed to do Transporter 2, Wolverine. But I couldn't do it because UFC was in the way."
That all changed, though, when Jackson caught wind that writer-director John Singleton (Boyz N the Hood) was moving an A-Team adaptation toward production.
"It was the whole reason I wanted to act," Jackson said.
The two had a meeting about 2 years ago but the project stalled. Enter writer-director Joe Carnahan (Narc, Smokin' Aces) with a revamped A-Team screenplay. And on the heels of casting call No 2, the Ultimate Fighter bested a Who's Who of pop-cultural heavyweights - rappers Common and Ice Cube and celebrated street brawler Kimbo Slice among them - to nab the role.
"I was destined to play this part!" Jackson exclaimed.
In the movie, the butt-kicking B. A. decides to turn over a new leaf by embracing nonviolence. But his Gandhi-esque resolve is put to the test when the team is backed into a corner by a bloodthirsty adversary. Despite his lack of acting chops, Jackson's casting served as a reassurance.
"I always thought from the beginning, if this movie is going to work, it's going to rise and fall on the person playing B. A.," Cooper said in Vancouver. "Mr T was so iconic and so much a part of The A-Team TV show - so much of what I think of when I think of The A-Team - that whoever plays that, if you get it right, 80% of the movie's already a success."
So how'd Jackson do?
"In my opinion, he's the best B. A. there could be," Cooper said. "It feels like a real coming-out moment for Rampage."
