See, people like Will Smith because he's never given them a reason not to like him. He would never play an evil cop like Denzel did (Training Day); he doesn't want us to see Evil Will Smith. He would never play someone trapped in a damaging 1950s marriage like Leo did (Revolutionary Road); he doesn't want us to think about Bad Husband Will Smith. Remember when Cruise released Magnolia and Eyes Wide Shut back-to-back, two of his rawest performances and the two single weirdest movies he ever made?16 Smith would never take a chance like that, much like Starbucks would never add grills to their stores and start flipping burgers and hot dogs. What's the point?
Just last month, a story circulated around Hollywood that Quentin Tarantino was desperately pursuing Smith as the lead for his next movie, Django Unchained, in which a freed slave teams up with a German bounty hunter to find his wife and ends up killing a bunch of plantation owners along the way.17 Supposedly the script is incredible. Supposedly Smith's agents at CAA, and even his manager, begged him to play Django. And supposedly, Smith turned it down. He didn't want to risk what he had. He didn't want people to meet Angry Slave Will Smith. He didn't want to mess with a sure thing.
The real answer though, as the A.V Club notes, is even more “Will Smithian” than that:
“Django wasn’t the lead, so it was like, I need to be the lead. The other character was the lead!” Smith tells Entertainment Weekly, but probably doing so in that charmingly egotistical way that Will Smith has where he also laughs at it, like, “Can you believe me? I named the next 1,000 years of human existence ‘The Willennium.’ Ha ha, I’m incorrigible.”
Anyway, Smith says he attempted to get Tarantino to meet him halfway by revising his screenplay to make it more of a Will Smith movie by reducing Christoph Waltz’s role, saying, “I was like, ‘No, Quentin, please, I need to kill the bad guy!’”—even though Django does get to kill plenty of bad guys and even enjoy a complete dramatic arc, in the movie named after him.
In other news, that end of the world/Avatar-like/SPECIAL EFFECTS movie starring Will Smith and his son doing blockbuster movie things comes out sometime soon. A far cry from his nice, clean rap, but I guess all you could do at this point is watch him rake in the millions and declare himself incorrigible.
[H/T: A/V Club]
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