Will Smith Refused To Kiss Another Man On Screen And McKellen Responds To Him
Smith played the title role opposite Stockard Channing and Donald Sutherland, who portrayed the wealthy gay couple of his choice. Eager to keep up with the veteran actors, Smith tried to embrace method acting 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 adamantly 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 commit artistically to that aspect of the film... This 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 that is 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 r.
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 in for the reading with a huge entourage: his family, his agent, his publicist, his acting coach, his nanny," she recalled, "he was a charmer and a good actor. But he did a foolish thing: he refused to kissing another guy on screen, even though it was in the script. So in a sneak peek, I met him in public outside the theater and gave him a big kiss on the lips."
He sadly didn't reveal how Will Smith reacted to the kiss, and with the absence of any video we like to imagine it was something like that.
