Will Smith Says 'A Thing Got Broken in My Mind' After the 'After Earth' Debacle

Jordan Zakarin
Updated


For more than 15 years, Will Smith was the King of the Summer: A reliably bankable, seemingly indefatigable star whose participation could turn pretty much any May-June-July movie into a hit. And though Smith stumbled from time to time — most notably with 1999’s deadly dull Wild Wild West — he always managed to bounce back, seemingly more energized than ever.

That changed, however, with 2013’s big-budget sci-fi flick After Earth, an expensive, critically reviled flop that co-starred Smith’s son Jaden, and that apparently prompted Smith to do some serious soul-searching.

“After the failure of After Earth, a thing got broken in my mind,” Smith recently told The Daily Beast.

The failure of After Earth, which made only $60 million in the US, served as a wake-up call of sorts: It was okay, he realized, to make a movie that wasn’t a guaranteed hit. ”I was like, ‘Oh, wow, — I’m still alive,” he said. “I still am me, even though the movie didn’t open number one. [I realized], ‘Wait, I can still get hired on another movie!’ All of those things in my mind and my entire ‘Mr. July,’ ‘Big Willie Weekend’ ‘number one,’ ‘eight in a row’ — all of those things got collapsed and I realized I still was a good person.”

Smith now stars in the upcoming con-man drama Focus, which co-stars Margot Robbie as an alluring young grifter who begins working for his operation and mucks up his well-polished game. A mid-budget drama for adults, it certainly doesn’t scream automatic box office champion — a reality that Smith, who will also star in DC’s big budget Suicide Squad comic adaptation, swears he’s learned to accept.

“It is a huge relief for me to not care whether or not Focus is number one or number 10 at the box office,” he said.

Smith added that his new view was inspired, in part, by his work on the 2001 Muhammad Ali biopic Ali. “Doing Ali was the first time that I realized [Muhammad Ali] would say ‘I’m the greatest’ because of how much the greatest he didn’t feel,” he said. “It was almost a mantra for himself, and that’s sort of a thing that I’ve developed. It’s actually nerve-wracking for me sometimes to walk into a new space. But if I just let myself go it’s a whole lot easier, rather than letting the voices — like, ‘Oh my god, Focus may not be good as Enemy of the State — come in.”