Will Smith was original cast to play Django in Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained,” and he’s finally opening up about why he turned down the now award winning role.
It turns out that Will Smith may have a bit of an ego problem.
While he admitted the film was a brilliant idea, he revealed that he just didn’t want to play a role that didn’t have him as the lead.
“Django wasn’t the lead, so it was like, I need to be the lead,” Smith told EW. “The other character was the lead!”
When Smith was considering the role, he realized that although the film was named after Django, it was Christoph Waltz’s character Dr. King Schultz that was the main protagonist that kept the story moving forward.
As it turns out, however, who the lead character is depends on who you ask because it was Jamie Foxx who ended up being deemed the lead character when award season rolled around.
He was also the face of the film and the one who did the most promotional appearances for the sake of the film.
Will’s viewpoint was drawn specifically from the fact that Django had a little less screen time and didn’t get the chance to kill the antagonist.
“I was like, ‘No, Quentin, please, I need to kill the bad guy,’” he persisted before finally leaving the film.
In this perspective he was kind of right. Django may have been named the lead, but he wasn’t necessarily the star of the film.
It was indeed Dr. King Schultz, the supporting character, who stole the show and took home the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
Either way, he was still more than happy to see the film do so well.
“I thought it was brilliant,” Smith said. “Just not for me.”
So what lead role did Will Smith walk away from “Django Unchained” for? A sci-fi flick where he will appear along side his very own son Jaden Smith.
“After Earth” is scheduled to hit theaters this summer and tells the story of two pilots who crash into earth thousands of years after it had already been abandoned and left as a desolate planet.
To be honest, we aren’t sure if Will is going to be happy with his decision after the film its theaters because it probably won’t perform as well as “Django Unchained,” but we could be wrong.
The only issue is that most people aren’t ecstatic over films where the main characters are likely to be the only characters and Smith already pretty much conquered the whole adventure on an empty planet concept when he starred in “I Am Legend.” You would think he would have opted with the role that could have shown off his diversity as an actor.
We are hoping that the film will still pull out a miraculous accomplishment, but we wouldn’t bet our money it.
