Will Smith has recently announced that he will be soon entering a new area as apart of his career. Smith has told a reporter that he is now looking to become a voice for the people. Honestly, we need more of those.
Smith says,
“I don’t like hanging in one place too long,” he says. “So I think, at this point, I’m elevating my ability to be useful in the world. I think that that’s what my grandmother always hoped, that I would make myself useful to people in this lifetime. I’m working really hard and my storytelling is elevating, my ability to be eloquent with my body and with my voice and to deliver ideas as an actor is elevating. And, you know, as I look at the political landscape, I think that there might be a future out there for me. They might need me out there. This is the first year that I’ve been incensed to a level that I can’t sleep, you know? So I’m feeling that at some point, in the near future, I will have to lend my voice to the conversation in a somewhat different way.”
In December, reportedly on Christmas, Smith’s new movie “Concussion” will be releasing. The movie is about a Nigerian man by the name of Dr. Bennet Omalu, who confronts the NFL about the safety of their player. Omalu is a forensic neuropathologist who discovered chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE while conducting a procedure on Pittsburgh Steelers player Mike Webster who actually died at 50 years old. Smith has been working to perfect his Nigerian accent for the part.
“I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to deliver it in a way that wasn’t distracting,” he says. “[I thought], ‘I might not be the actor for this,’ and I looked at it and I worked for about six weeks to get started on the accent, and then it fell into a place where I started to feel confident that I could dial it down to a level that it was authentic, but not distracting.”
Smith says that he is actually proud of the film makers of this movie for not being afraid of the NFL and being bold enough to make the movie.
“We had no intention of watering any aspect of this film down. The entire point that Bennet Omalu was making was ‘Tell the truth,’ you know? So our big struggle was not to sensationalize, and we kept very heavy focus on making sure the things that we were saying and the things that we were doing in the film [were accurate]. Even the juxtaposition of imagery is a huge thing — what you’re cutting from [and] to makes a statement. So we were very, very careful to make sure that we weren’t trying to paint good guys and bad guys. Bennet kept saying, ‘The truth doesn’t have a side.”
