Will Smith Refused To Kiss Another On-Screen Man And McKellen Hits Him Back
Smith played the title role opposite Stockard Channing and Donald Sutherland, who portrayed the wealthy gay couple of his choice. Eager to follow veteran actors, Smith tried to embrace the acting method for the first time, but there was a line he couldn’t cross. When the script called for Smith to kiss co-star Anthony Michael Hall, Hall flatly refused and the scene was cut to appease Smith.
“He was very immature of me,” Smith admitted to Entertainment Weekly in December 1993.
“I wasn’t emotionally stable enough to artistically commit to that aspect of the film…It was a valuable lesson for me. You either do it or you don’t.”
By this time, Smith already had two movie roles and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air under his belt, but he was still best known as a rapper, a genre still riddled with homophobic prejudice today.
The news that Will Smith had ended a gay kiss did not go unnoticed by Ian McKellen, who also starred in the film as South African billionaire Geoffrey Mille.
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He described the drama in an interview with Time Out London years later, revealing how he brazenly confronted Will Smith at the film’s premiere.
“[Smith] came to the reading with a huge entourage: his family, his agent, his publicist, his theater coach, his nanny, she remembers, he was a charmer and a good actor. But he did something stupid: he refused to kiss another guy on screen, even though it was in the script. So in preview, I met him in public outside the theater and gave him a big kiss on the lips.”
He unfortunately didn’t reveal how Will Smith reacted to the kiss, and in the absence of any video, we like to imagine it was something like that.
