Will Smith Wanted to Get All the Action Movies Out of His System Before It Was Too Late
Will Smith was once known as one of Hollywood’s biggest blockbuster action stars. The actor was well aware of his standing in the genre. At the same time, he was very much concerned about aging out of those kinds of roles.
Will Smith already started to feel his age doing this action movie
Smith’s path to movie stardom initially began with action movies. As an actor, he was steadily building his portfolio back in the 90s in works like Six Degrees of Separation and Fresh Prince of Belair. But Bad Boys was the start of Smith becoming the blockbuster star he’d later become. It was something he owed to filmmaker Michael Bay for insisting that he run around shirtless in the movie for this now iconic scene.
“For this scene, I wanted to have my shirt on, and Michael was like, ‘Dude, I’m going to make you a freaking movie star, take your shirt off,’” Smith recalled in an interview on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. “And I was like, ‘Michael, come on man,’ and he was like, ‘Dude, you don’t know, I know!’”
But Bay was right, so much so that the filmmaker frequently joked about wanting half of Smith’s movie earnings.
“To this day, every time I see Michael he’s like, ‘Dude, I should be in for half. I made your career,'” Smith said.
Bad Boys kicked off a trend that’d see Smith becoming one of the biggest action stars in the world. In addition to Bad Boys, the Oscar winner has starred in other big hits like Men in Black and Enemy of the State. But after hitting his mid-30s, Smith realized that being an action star was a lot harder than it used to be in his 20s. He was 35-years-old when he was filming I, Robot, where the wear and tear on his body started catching up with him.
“I started messing up my knee a little bit, my back started hurting. It was taking me a couple more takes to get the stunts,” Smith once said in an interview with The Washington Post. “And I was like, oh my God, it’s started. I, Robot will be the movie that I look back and remember that this is where I started getting old. It gave me the wake-up call of, Uh-oh, you’re not 19 or 20 anymore. If you injure yourself you gotta ice it, take care of yourself properly.”
This made Smith want to do as many action movies as possible before he aged out of them.
“I just feel like I have to knock these action movies out now, because I do not want to be that old dude runnin’,” Smith said. “You know the old dude runnin’?”
Will Smith felt he became a better actor as he got older
Although his physicality might’ve been declining, his skills as an actor were only improving the older he got. This greatly helped Smith when he was filming the feature Gemini Man, a sci-fi action film that pitted Smith against a younger clone. Smith would be digitally de-aged in order to play his younger self. But looking like a 23-year-old Smith was only half the work, as Smith had to act like him, too. The latter was easier said than done, as the movie’s director Ang Lee noted that Smith was a much better actor than he used to be.
“The biggest problem I’ve been saying is that Will is a much better actor today than 30 years ago,” Lee told Entertainment Weekly.
Smith understood what the filmmaker meant after reviwing some of his past work, which he considered embarrassing.
“Ang would show me some of my old performances and he’d say, ‘Look at this. That’s not good, I need you to do that.’ So I got to see all of the tragedies that I committed in entertainment,” he said.
