The actor who spent six months refusing to look Will Smith in the eye: He didn’t acknowledge”
The gleam may have rubbed off his public image since that Oscars slap, but working with a star of Will Smith’s wattage would still, you’d imagine, be grounds for some brown-nosing. This was far from the case on the set of an especially grim and gritty production in 2021, though, where Smith kept the company of a co-star who was so reluctant to interact with him between takes that he refused even to look him in the eyes.
The film in question, Emancipation, is directed by Antoine Fuqua and co-produced by Smith, who also stars as escaped slave Peter. Set after the issuing of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Peter attempts to flee to Louisiana while pursued by a cruel and relentless slave catcher, Fessel, played by Ben Foster.
Fessel seems to be modelled on colonial American mercenaries who slave owners paid to track freedom-seekers using dogs – sometimes for miles and miles. Their tracking dogs, usually bloodhounds, were even (horribly) nicknamed ‘negro dogs’. Peter, meanwhile, is based somewhat on a real historical figure: ‘Peter’, otherwise known as ‘Whipped Peter’, the subject of a photograph dated to 1863 of an escaped slave. In the image, he bears his “scourged back” of horrific whipping scars to the camera. The photo went the 19th-century equivalent of viral, fuelling the abolitionist movement and laying bare to the world the true horrors of the American slave trade.
All of this to say, Foster was cast in a decidedly unlikeable role in Emancipation and Smith in a highly sympathetic one. Foster clearly took this persona very seriously on set, to a degree that shocked his co-star. “Ben just walked past me and didn’t say nothing,” Smith said on an episode of his wife’s Red Table Talk show. “I was like, ‘Oh, he must not have seen me.’ And then, for six months, he didn’t speak to me, he didn’t make eye contact with me, he didn’t say a word. He didn’t acknowledge me for six months.”
Foster’s behaviour smacks of method acting, a technique that Smith tried once and swore never to do again. However, he gives Foster kudos for his commitment, elaborating that it helped him step his own game up. “What he did that first day, I was like, ‘Yup, got it.’ We’re not playing. This is real. This is serious. We’re not fooling around with these ideas. I really credit Ben for clicking me into the next gear of depth and focus.”
In a video clip, Foster returns the compliment. “I’m blown away by what Will Smith did in this film… we must reflect on our past in order to meet our current day, and our current day is rife with frightening similarities to what happened during this true story when that took place.”
This adversarial tension didn’t last the entire shoot, either. “I look over at Ben. It’s the last day, and he [extends his hand] says, ‘Nice to meet you,’” Smith laughs, adding, “We had been through that whole movie together. And the whole time he wasn’t going to his trailer, he was staying in his character tent all day long, and he had all his stuff in his character tent.”
Foster was so embedded into his character that when the pair went on the press circuit months after wrapping, Smith felt as though he was working with a complete stranger. “I was like, ‘Who are you? You kind soul, you,’” he says.
