Over 30 years into his career, Will Smith remains a major movie star. He’s led some of the most iconic films of the century, turning loose concepts into franchises on the sheer strength of his star power. That said, he doesn’t always make the best choices.
For every great blockbuster in Smith’s oeuvre, there’s a project he turned down for one regrettable reason or another. Most notably, he declined the leading role in The Matrix and passed on Django Unchained. Each misstep lives on as a “painful” reminder of what could have been, Smith revealed in an interview with Kiss Xtra. But the actor’s been hiding an even more painful rebuff for 15 years: Smith claims he very nearly starred in Christopher Nolan’s Inception, but didn’t understand the director’s vision.
“Chris Nolan brought me Inception first, and I didn’t get it,” he revealed. “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.”
Smith was one of two actors in contention for Inception before Leonardo DiCaprio eventually took the role. The Hollywood Reporter revealed that Nolan also approached Brad Pitt to play Dominic Cobb, a black market “extractor” who steals priceless intel from his targets by infiltrating their dreams. Per THR, Nolan requested a response from Pitt “within 48 hours,” a time window huge stars weren’t used to. When he didn’t jump at the project, Nolan moved on to Smith, then DiCaprio.
Inception wasn’t the only film Smith didn’t immediately “get” during a pitch, as The Matrix also stumped the actor when Lana and Lily Wachowski approached him. The directors pitched The Matrix’s opening sequence, emphasizing the unique, 360-degree camera movements that would allow characters to “freeze” in mid-air.
Smith interpreted their approach in a YouTube video in 2019: “Imagine you’re in a fight. You, like, jump. Imagine if you could stop jumping in the middle of the jump. But then, people could see around you 360 degrees while you stop jumping. We’re going to invent these cameras, and then people can see the whole jump when you stop in the middle of the jump.”
That kind of pitch might have been difficult for anyone to fully grasp, especially in the mid-‘90s. As for Django, Smith reportedly disagreed with director Quentin Tarantino’s approach. “It was just that Quentin and I couldn’t see [eye to eye],” he told THR in 2015. “I wanted to make that movie so badly, but I felt the only way was, it had to be a love story, not a vengeance story.”
These three projects may haunt Smith, but he maintains that everything happens for a reason. That’s a good attitude to have, and the actor has always bounced back, regardless of the roles he rejected. Smith is doing just fine, but his mistakes do emphasize the importance of trusting a director... even if their vision is a little fuzzy at the outset.
