Willow Smith has shared that her father, Will Smith, has turned down emotionally demanding acting roles in the past because he didn’t want to bring the “energy” associated with those characters into their family home.
The Academy Award-winning actor came up briefly during the latest episode of Kid Cudi’s Big Bro podcast, as Willow and Cudi discussed the emotional toll that certain projects can take on an actor.
“My dad has actually turned down certain roles because he felt the energy they carried was too heavy to bring home,” Willow revealed around the 55-minute mark of the video below. “Like, ‘Nah, I’m not even gonna touch that because I don’t want to be coming home to my family in this.'”
“That’s a deep one. You really have to embody it if you’re doing it right,” the 25-year-old added.
In his 2021 memoir, Will, the Men in Black star reflected on his first major dramatic role as Paul in 1993’s Six Degrees of Separation, explaining how using method acting techniques for the film became an emotional burden during his first marriage to Sheree Zampino.
The former spouses divorced in 1995 after three years of marriage. Two years later, Smith married Jada Pinkett Smith.
Smith is also known for turning down several roles in films that would eventually become major blockbusters, including Django Unchained, The Matrix, and Inception.
Smith passed on the lead role in Django because he viewed the film as a “vengeance story,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. However, he would later portray an enslaved man named Peter in the 2022 historical drama Emancipation.
