Will Smith is one of those actors who has seemed to have played every single role you can think of.
From The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to Agent J in Men in Black, and Christopher Gardner in The Pursuit of Happiness, he's played them all.
Despite going on to win a coveted Academy Award (we'll ignore the slap for today), there is one movie Smith regrets turning down.
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Before we reveal, or you scroll down, let's see if you can guess first.
The movie classic came out in 1999 and it starred Keanu Reeves, who played a normal dude one day finding out that he's a superpowered messiah sent to free us from a digital prison.
Yep, as you have probably guessed - Smith missed out on The Wachowskis' The Matrix.
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Back in 1998, the casting team were looking for the right man to play Neo.
But Smith claims the way they pitched it to him was not convincing.
On a recent episode of Full Send Podcast, the veteran actor revealed: "So yeah, I had Neo, so it was going to be me, and Val Kilmer was Morpheus."
However, Smith admits that he wouldn't have been right for the role.
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"But it would have been a whole different thing, when you see it, like Keanu was absolutely a perfect Neo," he said.
"I would have been trying to do jokes and stuff like that I think I would have messed it up."
“It was a crazy time in my life,” Smith also said in a 2019 YouTube video on his channel.
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“It was like however I threw the ball, it was going in.
“[The Wachowskis] came in and they made a pitch for The Matrix.
“And as it turns out, they’re geniuses! But there’s a fine line in a pitch meeting between genius and what I experienced in the meeting.
“Imagine you could stop in the middle of the jump.
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“But then people could see around you 360 while you stopped jumping.”
“I had so much success that I started to taste global blood,” Smith told The Hollywood Reporter in 2016.
“And my focus shifted from my artistry to winning. I wanted to win and be the biggest movie star, and what happened was there was a lag—around Wild Wild West time. I found myself promoting something because I wanted to win versus promoting something because I believed in it.”
Topics: Film, Will Smith, The Matrix, Keanu Reeves, Entertainment
Anish Vij