Where’s the ‘fun of life’? Ask Will Smith

Will Smith as Richard Williams - tennis legends Venus and Serena Williams' father - in the film 'King Richard' (Image: Screen grab)

Richard Williams produced not one but two tennis champions. The champions were his daughters, Venus Williams and Serena Williams. He coached them alone, on cracked public courts in a violent neighbourhood in California.

It is the stuff of fantasy, and occasional reality. Chances are it will never happen again. To make it to the top in international sport is hard. For children from an impoverished family, it is more so. For two children from the same family? What are you smoking?

But Will Smith, the actor who plays Richard Williams in the new release King Richard, feels the thrill of life is in having a crazy dream, and also having fun chasing it. Even if you do not hit a Williams level moonshot.

“Aunjanue (Ellis, who plays the sisters’ mother Oracene) referred to Richard and Oracene: She said that they were co-conspirators in this crazy dream,” Smith said in an interview in The New York Times. “To me, everybody wants to have a crazy dream. You have to have fun with the absolute insanity of what you want to create in your life, unify your family around it and go for it. That’s the fun of life. We can’t all expect to hit it how the Williams family hit it, but I’m loving shining light on the idea of a family going for it.”

Smith also spoke about the intangible components of acting. Richard Williams walked with a limp - he was attacked as a child by white assailants. Mimicking the walk is one thing. To know why the walk was a certain way is another. A good actor understands the why of it.

“At the core, acting is what can you comprehend emotionally. And when you comprehend it emotionally, do you understand it enough to feel it and create interesting behaviour around it?” Smith said.

“So something like Richard Williams’s walk: Now, you can mimic someone’s walk and look authentic. It’s a completely different thing when you know why the person is hunching over versus the stand-up-comedian version of it; just mimicking it. Understanding that was the leap that happened. When you know why Richard Williams’s left leg hurts, what happened with the spike that got driven through it, that, as an actor, is the 90 percent of the iceberg that’s below the surface.”

Some may say this is over-intellectualising acting, which in its simplest form is playing a character and remembering lines. But Smith says that subtleties have an effect on the audience.

“When you’ve programmed it deeply, those things have corresponding vibrations for the audience that they don’t even realize,” Smith said.

As for his own walk, he said that at age 53, he didn’t care much about wanting to impress people anymore.

“At this point in my life, I’m comfortable in my body. I’m OK with things not being perfect. I don’t have to look right. My mind isn’t drifting to what people are thinking when I walk in anymore,” Smith said. “It’s much less performative and conscious.”