14 DAY TRIAL // Before Jamie Foxx was cast as Django in Quentin Tarantino’s most recent blockbuster “Django Unchained,” Will Smith was in talks for the role. He explains just now that he turned it down because it wasn’t the lead.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Will (who is now promoting “After Earth”) says Django wasn’t enough of a central character for him and that he didn’t want to play second fiddle to Christoph Waltz and his bounty hunter.
“Django wasn’t the lead, so it was like, I need to be the lead. The other character was the lead!” Smith says.
“I was like, ‘No, Quentin, please, I need to kill the bad guy!’,” the actor says of trying to negotiate with Tarantino about the amount of screentime he would get if he agreed to do the part.
Even though he passed on the opportunity to be in the film, Will still liked it. “I thought it was brilliant. Just not for me,” he says.
Ironically, Waltz’s character was considered a secondary one by the Academy: the role earned him a second Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.