Will Smith Is Done Trying to Be Perfect (Published 2021) (2024)

Will Smith’s superpower as a performer — as a movie star — has always been his radiating charisma. Who else could have credibly portrayed Muhammad Ali, the most charismatic man ever? In “King Richard,” Smith transmutes that gift into something subtler but just as powerful in his portrayal of Richard Williams, father of Venus and Serena. (Smith, as he was eager to acknowledge, was supported in the film by Saniyya Sidney as Venus, Demi Singleton as Serena and Aunjanue Ellis as the girls’ mother and Williams’s wife at the time, Oracene Price.) Richard Williams, as embodied by Smith, is a man who has been physically bowed but not beaten. He has a limp from a racist attack as a child; his carriage is tense, a little unsure, as if always on alert for a sucker punch. He’s someone who has spent time beneath the underdog. And yet when it comes to Williams’s daughters and his dreams for them of tennis greatness, Smith invests his character with his trademark on-screen self-assurance. That Smith, who is 53 and who this autumn published a searching memoir, “Will,” was able to express those disparate traits so effectively is something he attributes to the work, precipitated by that book, that he has lately put into himself. “I wouldn’t have been able to play Richard Williams in this way,” Smith says, “before I had examined my life and understood so many aspects of my childhood and how that affected the decisions I made as a parent.”

There’s a key scene in “King Richard” in which Richard Williams talks about getting beaten up by a gang of white men as a child and seeing his father run away rather than help him. Not wanting to repeat that act of cowardice is ostensibly what drove his behavior toward his daughters. In your book, you write about seeing your dad hit your mom and how the cowardice that you felt for not intervening subsequently drove your own behaviors. When it came time to play Richard Williams, had you made any links between those situations? Absolutely. As an actor, you’re trying to find the aspects of the character that you most innately understand. So I could relate to Richard Williams similarly as I related to my father. I could relate to both their senses of disrespect. They felt unsupported and disrespected, and that was central for both of them. I started finding all those parallels, and also what happened is I got better as an actor during that time. I was organizing my memoir while I was working on “King Richard.” These two things have gone together. My ability as an actor expanded in the last 18 months. It’s one of the most exponential jumps in emotional comprehension that I’ve ever had.

Good acting can be such an intangible thing. What are you looking at as evidence of improvement? At the core, acting is what can you comprehend emotionally. And when you comprehend it emotionally, do you understand it enough to feel it and create interesting behavior around it? So something like Richard Williams’s walk: Now, you can mimic someone’s walk and look authentic. It’s a completely different thing when you know why the person is hunching over versus the stand-up-comedian version of it just mimicking it. Understanding that was the leap that happened: When you know why Richard Williams’s left leg hurts, what happened with the spike that got driven through it, that, as an actor, is the 90 percent of the iceberg that’s below the surface. When you’ve programmed it deeply, those things have corresponding vibrations for the audience that they don’t even realize.

You said “eight years ago.” Does your walk say something different now? At this point in my life, I’m comfortable in my body. I’m OK with things not being perfect. I don’t have to look right. My mind isn’t drifting to what people are thinking when I walk in anymore. It’s much less performative and conscious.