Early on, Django Unchained had a pretty ambitious casting choice for the lead role of Django: Will Smith. Could you imagine Smith playing a badass freed slave turned bounty hunter in a Quentin Tarantino movie? I couldn’t! But it almost happened.
Initially, it was thought he turned the film down to make After Earth with M. Night Shyamalan and little Will Smith, but Smith says there’s something more to his rejection. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Smith revealed one of his reasons.
“Django wasn’t the lead, so it was like, I need to be the lead. The other character was the lead! I was like, ‘No, Quentin, please, I need to kill the bad guy!’”
He’s kiinda right. The other character he’s referring to is Christoph Waltz’s King Schultz. It was more of a co-lead situation though. Django was the focus of the entire movie, and most of the co-lead feeling comes from the magical work of Waltz, who ended up winning an Oscar for Supporting Actor.
Smith is notorious for re-writing the movies he’s in. The man is box office gold so maybe he has that right. It’s a slippery slope, honestly – the whole letting-a-giant-movie-star re-write-your-movie-so-that-it-makes-more-money-thing. This is kind of a douchey move though. It’s Quentin Tarantino so there’s going to be a certain level of quality there and you just have to accept, or recognize at least, that he might know what he’s doing.
Plus, having Django kill Leonardo DiCaprio’s Calvin Candy would have totally nerfed the arc for Waltz’s character. All in the name of making Will Smith the lead good guy. It’s also a hugely egotistical thing for a movie star to say, but you don’t expect Smith to say something like that.
Somehow, this makes me appreciate Jamie Foxx even more. I also wouldn’t be surprised if Smith was afraid of all the racial themes and violence in the script. You can next see Smith in After Earth, which comes out on June 7. [Entertainment Weekly]
