The next time Will Smith gets offered an alternate reality sci-fi thriller, he should seriously consider just saying, “Yes!”
First, the actor admitted he turned down The Matrix, which cast Keanu Reeves instead.
Now Smith confirms he also turned down the lead role Christopher Nolan‘s Inception, which starred Leonardo DiCaprio.
“I don’t think I’ve ever said it publicly before, but I am going to say it now because we are opening up to one another,” Smith told the radio station KISS XTRA, with a fair amount of good humor. “Chris Nolan brought me Inception first and I didn’t get it. I’ve never said that out loud. Now that I think about it, it’s those movies that go into those alternate realities they don’t pitch well. But I am hurt by those, too … It hurts too bad to talk about.”
The Independence Day star turning down 1999’s The Matrix is actually pretty understandable, as writers-directors The Wachowskis were still an unknown quantity at the time. Rejecting 2010’s Inception when Nolan was coming off his blockbuster masterpiece The Dark Knight, however, seems like a more baffling move. Yet he wasn’t the only A-list actor to pass on the role — likely due to Nolan’s high-pressure casting strategy.
In Inception, the lead character plants ideas in people’s dreams as a novel form of corporate espionage. As The Hollywood Reporter revealed at the time, Nolan first offered the twisty script to Brad Pitt but demanded the actor accept within 48 hours. When Pitt didn’t commit, Nolan went to Smith. When Smith didn’t accept, Nolan sent it to DiCaprio, who took it.
“It’s never couched as, ‘Hey, I’m more important than you, therefore just say yes,’” said an executive, noting big stars “are used to having people wait a year or more” before they commit and “usually don’t have to board a moving train.”
Inception went on to gross more than $800 million at the global box office. Needless to say, nowadays the Oscar-winning director can probably get top actors to sign onto a project even without showing them a script.
As for The Matrix, Smith has candidly detailed the pitch meeting for that project and recently did a music video for “Beautiful Scars” where Smith played a parody version of Neo.
“I’m not proud of it, but it’s the truth, all right, I did turn down Neo in The Matrix,” Smith said in a YouTube video posted five years ago. “After we made Men in Black, the Wachowskis came in and they’d only done one movie. They did a movie called Bound. And then they made a pitch for The Matrix. And as it turns out, they’re geniuses, but there’s a fine line in a pitch meeting between genius and what I experienced in the meeting. So this is the actual pitch that they made for The Matrix …”
At this point in the video, Smith humorously enacted a meeting where the Wachowskis enthuse confusingly about various wild action moves the character would be doing, but didn’t discuss the film’s plot or character (“And then we’ll put in 50 cameras, and you’ll see the whole jump while you stop in the middle of the jump …”).
“So I made Wild Wild West [instead],” Smith admitted, referring to his notorious 1999 sci-fi flop.
Having said that, Smith added, “Keanu was perfect. Laurence Fishburne was perfect. If I had done it, because I’m Black, [Fishburne’s character] Morpheus wouldn’t have been Black because they were looking at Val Kilmer [for] Morpheus. So I probably would have messed The Matrix up. I would have ruined it. I did y’all a favor.”
