Will Smith would not seem a clear candidate for the midlife crisis. Great success, immense popularity, insatiable sunny weather.
However, Smith, who will star in the next drama “King Richard,” reappears after a long period of introspection as Richard Williams, the father and coach of Venus and Serena Williams. The 53-year-old, as he wrote in his new memoir, meditates, participates in Ayahuasca rituals, and generally asks many questions about his childhood and his choices as a father, husband, and movie star. increase.
What inspired Smith’s self-inquiry?
“My family was starting to hate me,” he says with a laugh. “Everything was going well and everyone was very miserable. I thought,” Maybe I should take a look at this. “
“From a spiritual point of view, I started hitting the ceiling of what material pursuits could offer. I climbed many mountains and began to notice carrots with a stick of material success,” Smith continued. increase. “If all the hit movies were there, I would be confused, so I think I started expecting something else.”
With box office revenues of over $ 4 billion, Smith is one of the movie’s greatest attractions and the most natural showman. But in Smith’s blockbuster life, he is no longer interested in pretending to be superhuman. Warner Bros.’s “Dream Plan,” released at theaters and HBO Max on Friday, is part of the actor’s new direction. His performance is a delicate and soulful portrait of his father who directs all his pain to his love for his family. And that led to the best reviews of Smith’s career. Two-time Oscar nominee (“Ali”, “The Power of Happiness”), Smith is widely regarded as a favorite for winning his first Academy Award.
“Ten years ago, we wouldn’t have had the maturity or life experience to find subtle colors and textures,” Smith said in a recent interview. “Richard Williams is a difficult person to love, but he is a difficult person to love because of how much he loves. He is very brutal, very despised and ignored. You. When he hit the trigger, there was a damaged volcano. His family became his oasis. “
Reinaldo Marcus Green’s “King Richard” is an intimate view of Williams’ tennis jaguar notes, a subtle depiction of his father’s coach, and is often described as a self-euphoric megalomaniac. This is the approved view of the Williams family. Isha Price, one of the three half-sisters of Venus and Serena, is a producer. It captures them as a tightly-knit family whose achievements from Compton to Center Court have come from their determination and unity.
Aunjanue Ellis plays her mother, Aura Senprice. (Price and Williams divorced in 2002.) “King Richard” may be more important than Richard, but Ellis’s performance is also Ellis’s lesser-known but formative parent of Serena and Venus. Was chosen in a way that honors.
“She is one of the long lines of black women I personally know, smiling or not smiling, but carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders,” says Ellis. “In general, mothers like her can’t tell what they’re doing in their children’s lives. They’re children’s coaches, but at the same time they cook and clean their hair. I need to trim and sew a tennis outfit. She was very kind to this family. “
For Smith, the role of Richard Williams has received a lot of feedback from his own father. In Smith’s new autobiography, Will, written by personal growth author Mark Manson, Smith lovingly describes his father, but he is also a temperamental, militarist man. He remembers what made Smith feel when he saw his father attack his mother at the age of nine. He writes like a “coward” who didn’t protect her. Smith explains that fear has driven him into show business. Long after, Smith remembers feeling the urge to push him down the stairs when his father was elderly and trapped in a wheelchair.
Such a confession is far from the super-fun persona that Smith has long embodied. Smith is still the best entertainer, as he showed on a star-studded book tour with Oprah Winfrey, Ava DuVernay and more. But he is now expressing more vulnerabilities in the therapeutic journeys that people around the world have presented to witness.
“I’m mining myself and I’m vulnerable to my own exposure, so I’m seeing the ability to understand others and increasing my ability as an actor,” says Smith. “A personal journey into the joy of the past and the depth of trauma is undoubtedly an extension and construction of a larger emotional toolbox that will allow us to draw more complex characters in the coming years. It will help. “
Smith filmed “Liberation” this year with director Antoine Hook. This is a true story of a heavily tortured slave man who was released from a southern farm and joined the Union Army in the 1860s. The Apple-distributed film withdrew its production from Georgia after the state passed a restricted voting law.
In Smith, Green, the director of “Monsters and Men” and “Jobel,” found an actor who was “trapped.”
“I once met a supercharged Will in his career that he had something to prove to himself,” says Green. “He’s looking for someone who isn’t just saying yes. He’s probably surrounded by people who tell him a lot.”
It also included telling Smith not to use prostheses on his face to make him look like Williams. Williams himself was never on the set. Instead, the filmmaker relied on Esha Price to contact the Williams family. Serena and Venus are executive producers of the film and attended a recent premiere at the AFI Film Fest in Los Angeles.
Smith’s own family has been in the limelight for years. Jada Pinkett Smith’s Facebook series “Red Table Talk” features Smith’s sons Jaden (23), Willow (21), and Tray (29) from their first marriage to Sherry Zampino. They provided a very candid view of their relationship and family life. Much of their young life was on the camera — Jayden first co-starred with his father in The Pursuit of Happyness and co-starred with Willow in “I Am Legend.”
In a moving episode of Smith’s YouTube series, The Best Shape in My Life, Smith read the children’s chapter from his memoirs and shared joy and regret about how to raise children. ..
“One thing I’m proud of is getting the kids to dominate and rule their lives faster,” says Smith. “I didn’t develop an addiction — probably too young and too free. But at a very young age, they were independent about their thoughts and opinions.”
Smith’s personal evolution is underway, but his shift in a straightforward direction may be permanent. “At this point in my life, authenticity is far more powerful than a mystery,” he said in his YouTube series.
“Being able to use what we have collected in the first 50 years is becoming a central focus of my life,” says Smith. “And we will start distributing it in the next 50 years.”
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Follow AP film writer Jake Coil on Twitter: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP
For Will Smith, breakpoints lead to “King Richard” | WGN Radio 720
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