American actor Will Smith has revealed why he turned down the lead role in Quentin Tarantino’s slave-era movie ‘Django Unchained’.
The star was talking at The Hollywood Reporter’s Actor’s Roundtable discussion when he explained his issues with the movie.
The lead role of Django, a black slave searching for his wife, who has been taken by a psychotic plantation owner, eventually went to Jamie Foxx.
“It was about the creative direction of the story,” Smith said, sitting opposite Samuel L. Jackson, who took a main role in the movie as Stephen, the overseer of the plantation slaves.
“To me, it’s as perfect a story as you could ever want: a guy that learns how to kill to retrieve his wife that has been taken as a slave. That idea is perfect. And it was just that Quentin and I couldn’t see [eye to eye]. I wanted to make that movie so badly, but I felt the only way was, it had to be a love story, not a vengeance story. We can’t look at what happens in Paris [the terrorist attacks] and want to f**k somebody up for that. Violence begets violence. I just couldn’t connect to violence being the answer. Love had to be the answer.”
Smith will be courting an Oscar nomination in his next movie Concussion, playing Nigerian forensic pathologist Dr. Bennet Omalu, who brought attention to the effects of head trauma injuries in the NFL.
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