Will Smith hopes Oscars slap doesn’t hurt awards hopes for new movie

Will Smith on faith, racism, his new film Emancipation, and how he hopes it will not be affected at awards time by his infamous Oscars slap.

In Will Smith’s new film about enslaved black American “Whipped Peter”, who fled barbaric forced labour on a railroad in 1863 and went on a ruinous 10-day journey through the Louisiana swamps before finding refuge at a Union encampment, there was one person at the forefront of his mind.

“My grandmother was there. She’s now passed, about 10 years ago, but I knew that making a movie where the character was centred on his faith, and his faith in God was the way that he was going to make his way through his adversities, I knew my grandmother was applauding from the other side,” he says.

“She was in my mind almost every day.”

Glancing skywards, he adds that his grandmother GiGi, “was my conduit to God”.

“I felt like my grandmother had a first-hand relationship with God. And I knew I couldn’t hear God. But I felt like she could.

“My family, my children, my grandmother and my mother and father, when I started my career, were all there when I was escaping as Peter. I have always had people close to me that I’m trying to please. But, yeah, my grandmother was front and centre.”

Will Smith in a scene from the Apple TV+ movie Emancipation.

In Antoine Fuqua’s Emancipation, the country had been at war for two years when Peter (Smith) is removed from the sprawling Louisiana plantation where he labours and lives alongside his wife, Dodienne (Charmaine Bingwa), their children and many other enslaved black people. The family’s separation is a cacophony of screams and tears, and soon Peter is tossed into a cage on a horse-drawn cart with other slaves and ferried to a labour camp to build railroad tracks for the Confederacy.

His subsequent resolve to escape abject slavery and violence, and return to his beloved wife and children, is spellbinding.

Director Antoine Fuqua and Will Smith discuss a scene from Emancipation.

Smith says he, himself, has been the target of indirect racism.

“I was shielded for the most part until I was, maybe 10 years old, that was the first time I started realising that I was different and being treated differently,” he says.

“My teenage years were my greatest contact with the difficulties of racism. In terms of the work, my deepest hope is that audiences will be moved first and foremost. I want when people watch this movie, that they’re moved, and my hope is that through the understanding of the depiction of these human atrocities, that a level of compassion can be ignited in the hearts and minds of people in the audience.”

Smith, 54, did not speak to his cast members during the seven months filming on set to remain in character.

Reviews for Emancipation have been predominantly positive, with four-star ratings praising its commitment to the brutal truth and the resolute, moving performance of its leading actor.

Word is Emancipation is in the bidding for an Oscar.

Will Smith (right) slaps host Chris Rock onstage during the 94th Oscars at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood in March. Picture: Robyn Beck/AFP

Smith is acutely aware the thriller may be overshadowed by the highly publicised moment he struck presenter Chris Rock on the Dolby Theatre stage at the Oscars eight months ago. He has been banned for 10 years from attending the Oscars, but that does not preclude him from receiving a nomination.

“In terms of awards, my hope is … Antoine did some of the greatest work of his career, and Bob Richardson (cinematographer) and Ben (Foster) and Charmaine (Bingwa), so my hope is that the world-class artists that have worked on this film will have an opportunity to be recognised for their work,” he says.

“When you have actors come up to you and hug you with tears in their eyes crying … We had spiritual leaders and priests on the set to help us all through it. When you see a collective group coming together like that, for one cause, you have more faith and hope in humanity, that there’s more good and evil.”

“We are depicting American slavery, but this is not an American problem. It’s not a white problem. It’s not a black problem. It’s a human difficulty. It is in the hearts of all humans on the planet.

“The entire humanity is struggling with the idea of comparative superiority, that somehow we’re better than other people. Right? It’s like ‘Oh, yeah, well, you know, we did x, but they did y, and what they did is way worse than what we did.

“I realised the problem is the collective human heart more than individual hearts, and as soon as we can realise that we’re all sages, and we’re all savages, and start seeing the sameness between one another, we won’t repeat the sins of the past.”

Will Smith and his wife Jada Pinkett Smith arrive for the premiere of Emancipation at the Regency Village Theatre in Westwood, California, last month. Picture: Michael Tran/AFP

Smith says the film is a combination of a comeback for him after the Oscars “slap” and dealing with his past demons addressed in his book, Will, about his life both in and out of the spotlight, from his early rap career in Philadelphia to his troubled relationship with his abusive father.

“Two years ago, when I started on my book and exposing aspects of myself that I had hidden my entire career, I confronted things in my life that I had put off,” he says. “I started to see the connection between mining that emotional space and the quality of my acting started to elevate.

“In Emancipation, I started to see through confronting my difficulties, through confronting my pain, through confronting my suffering, I was becoming a more alive artist.

“So the message of Peter (Smith) is the relationship between suffering and salvation.

“You know, Peter has gotten me through many a difficult night with the understanding that suffering, even self imposed, when embraced through faith and the work to get, you know, your heart to a loving space, that that suffering is always leading the right direction, toward God and toward love.

“To find the love and faith my grandmother had.”

Emancipation streams from Friday on Apple TV+

Originally published as Will Smith hopes Oscars slap doesn’t hurt awards hopes for new movie