Will Smith is the only actor to ever have eight films in a row make over $100M, but the superstar has still managed to turn down some incredibly good roles.
The latest missed opportunity came in Quentin Tarantino’s bloody slave-revenge fantasy epic “Django Unchained,” where Smith was the rumored front runner for the titular character before Jamie Foxx eventually landed the role.
Many speculated about why Smith decided not to play Django, but now the actor has come clean admitting that he wanted a bigger role in the film because he thought that Christoph Waltz’s bounty hunter character would steal the show, according to Entertainment Weekly.
“Django wasn’t the lead, so it was like, I need to be the lead. The other character was the lead!” Smith said.
Smith was so annoyed with the script that he pleaded with Tarantino to change the structure of the story. “I was like, ‘No, Quentin, please, I need to kill the bad guy!’”
In the film (SPOILER ALERT), Waltz’s character kills the main villain, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and the Austrian-German actor did give a standout performance earning himself his second Academy Award for “Best Supporting Actor.”
Even though Smith is a genuine superstar, the actor has passed on a number of great projects in the past.
The most legendary example came when he turned down the chance to play “Neo” in “The Matrix,” so that he could make box office flop “Wild Wild West.”