The scene Will Smith refused to shoot: “It was very immature on my part”
While the infamous Oscars slap has indeed run a brush of tar across Will Smith‘s career, the fact remains that his filmography is still littered with a handful of commendable efforts. After all, Smith won the ‘Best Actor’ Academy Award for his performances in King Richard and was also nominated for the same commendation for Ali and The Pursuit of Happiness.
With the likes of I, Robot, I Am Legend, Seven Pounds, Bad Boys and Men in Black to his name, Smith’s career possesses an enviable level of quality. One ought not to forget, of course, his breakthrough appearance in the widely beloved American sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
As for Smith’s first major role, though, it came in the 1993 drama Six Degrees of Separation, directed by Fred Schepisi and adapted from John Guare’s 1990 play of the same name. While the film served as Smith’s entry into dramatic roles following The Fresh Prince, it’s also the movie in which the actor refused to kiss his male co-star Anthony Michael Hall.
During an interview with Entertainment Weekly in 1993, Smith opened up on his refusal, noting, “It was very immature on my part. I was thinking, ‘How are my friends in Philly going to think about this?’ I wasn’t emotionally stable enough to artistically commit to that aspect of the film… This was a valuable lesson for me. Either you do it, or you don’t.”
The fact that Smith refused a gay kiss was picked up on by the community, and he was somewhat lambasted for his lack of ability to move beyond the realms of his own character for the good of a fictional person. In fact, even fellow actor Sir Ian McKellen once spoke of the incident and explained how he looked to teach Smith a lesson.
“[Smith] arrived for [a] read-through with a huge entourage — his family, his agent, his publicity person, his acting coach, his nanny,” McKellen once told TimeOut London. “He was a charmer and a good actor. But he did one silly thing: he refused to kiss another boy on screen, even though it was there in the script.”
McKellen then explained how he took it upon himself to perhaps show Smith that kissing a man really wasn’t all that bad, noting, “Which was why, at an early preview, I met him in public outside the cinema and gave him a great big kiss on the lips.” Smith perhaps ought to have had the maturity to kiss his co-star back in the early 1990s, and it only took a moment of Ian McKellen’s intimacy to show him.
