Will Smith Recounts The Real Reason Why He Turned Down The Matrix

Hollywood is full of many glorious casting stories. Stories of iconic roles almost going to completely different actors, thereby potentially changing film history forever. One such story that’s been told many times over by many third and second parties is that of Will Smith, who notoriously turned down The Wachowskis’ The Matrix to do Wild Wild West.

Of course, we can look back on the way things turned out and laugh at Will Smith, but we don’t really know what his whole perspective on the situation was. There are plenty of examples out there of movies that many thought would be disasters but ended up as classics (Star Wars and The Godfather are the ones that immediately come to mind)…so what was it that Will Smith got to see?

“As it turns out, they’re geniuses. But there’s a fine line in a pitch meeting between genius and what I experienced in the meeting. So this is the actual pitch that they made for The Matrix.

“(In a bro voice)’Dude, we’re thinking like, like imagine you’re in a fight and then you, like jump, imagine you can stop jumping in the middle of the jump. But then, people could see around you, 360 while you’re jumping — while you stopped jumping. Right? And then, we’re going to invent these cameras. And then people can see whole jump, while you’re stopped in the middle of the jump.’

“So I made Wild Wild West.”

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Yeah, you can watch the whole thing, and it really puts the entire ordeal into perspective. They apparently weren’t pitching the story, but the VFX innovations they were trying to do. But, there is a silver lining here. Because Smith turned it down, it allowed Keanu Reeves to take the job and Laurence Fishburne to play Morpheus (because those two leads both couldn’t be black, apparently). So, Smith claims he did us all a favor, and I can’t say I disagree.

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SOURCE: Will Smith

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