Will Smith Predicts the Future, Says ‘It’s Going to Be a F*cking Mess’ at ‘Bright’ Press Event

Jenna Marotta

Updated December 13, 2017 at 8:11 PM

“This is the purge, right?” Will Smith asked the crowd. “This is the cleanse, this is what happens. This is the natural reaction to the amount of light that came into the world when Barack Obama was the president.”

It was the day after Doug Jones’ stunning win in Alabama and Smith was in a Four Seasons conference room with Joel Edgerton and director David Ayer, promoting their Netflix film, “Bright.” Presumably in a nod to the film’s setting of dystopian Los Angeles, Netflix dressed down the Beverly Hills location with traffic cones, a rusty gate, and an upturned grocery cart.

While Smith never mentioned Jones or President Trump by name, he clearly had the current political climate in mind as he warmed to his subject. “We had to expect that [the pendulum] was going to go the other way,” he said. “As a cleanse — this is the darkness before the dawn.”

When that happens, he said, “I feel very, very strongly that we are shifting into what the next age of humanity is going to be right now,” he said. “It’s just the shit has to get stirred up, in a way. We’re seeing it all.”

The two-time Oscar nominee concluded, “It’s going to be really interesting to see how humanity reacts to it, and it’s going to be a fucking mess. It’s going to be a mess, but it’s the mess in the cleanup. It’s the mess and the purge before that new, real light shows up.”

It’s not the first time Smith’s gone off on political tangents; his sentiments were similar to ones he expressed while promoting his prior collaboration with Ayer, “Suicide Squad,” less than three months before President Trump’s 2016 election. “As painful as it is to hear Donald Trump talk and as embarrassing as it is to hear him talk, I think it’s good,” he told a Dubai press conference. “We get to hear it, we get to know who people are, and now we get to cleanse it out of our country.”

“Bright” is a Max Landis-penned script that Netflix acquired in Spring 2016, reportedly investing more than $90 million into the project, the most it’s spent on any feature. Smith and Edgerton play an interspecies cop duo tasked with stopping dark magical forces. Watch the trailer below, ahead of its December 22 release.