Will Smith is one of the greatest actors of Hollywood today. He once even held a Guinness World Record for being among the hardest working people in Hollywood. In 1993, Smith took on his first major movie role. But did you know he refused to film a same-s*x kiss scene for it?
Will wasn’t always the iconic A-list star he is now. In the early 1990s, he was still best known as a rapper. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air set him on the path to acting. But which is this film we are talking about? Continue reading further to find out.
According to reports in Cheatsheet, the film in question was 1993’s Six Degrees of Separation. In truth, the comedy/drama was Will Smith’s third movie. But his parts in 1992’s Where the Day Takes You and 1993’s Made in America were decidedly smaller.
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Will Smith usually goes to an extreme level to attain perfection for any role. But, despite that, he drew the line in one scene. Since Paul is a gay character, the script for Six Degrees of Separation called for Smith to kiss co-star, Anthony Michael Hall. But the Fresh Prince refused to kiss Hall in the scene. Instead, the scene was cut around the moment to appease Smith.
“It was very immature on my part,” Smith admitted to in December 1993. “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.”
Ian McKellen is gay himself, and he has been open about this since a long time. Will Smith’s behaviour rubbed him off the wrong way. “He arrived for the read-through with a huge entourage — his family, his agent, his publicity person, his acting coach, his nanny. 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. 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.”
Well, Smith did not expect something like this was coming his way. Anyway! What do you think about this incident?
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