FilmDrunk

Jaden Smith Is Set To Play A Cross-Dressing Slave In A Historical Satire

For anyone hoping that After Earth‘s massive flop at the domestic box office would be enough to spare us more Jaden Smith movies, tough luck. It actually ended up earning $244 million worldwide (75% overseas) and now we get six more weeks of Will Smith’s wiener kids. The wannabe Buddha‘s latest booking is in a project called The Good Lord Bird, opposite Liev Schrieber, and holy shit I can’t believe this is real:

Liev Schreiber and Jaden Smith are set to star in The Good Lord Bird, a big-screen adaptation of the 2013 National Book Award winner by James McBride (Miracle At St. Anna, Red Hook Summer). McBride is aboard to produce the pic about Henry “Onion” Shackleford (Smith), a young slave who links up with radical abolitionist John Brown (Schreiber) in 1856 Kansas and travels the nation with Brown’s motley crew of freedom fighters. Story is told with a satirical bent through the eyes of Onion, who wears a dress and is at first mistaken for a girl, as he bears witness to Brown’s historic campaign and encounters the likes of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman en route to the bloody Harper’s Ferry raid that helped spark the Civil War. [Deadline]

So, to recap, Will Smith’s buffoonish child who has become the butt of everyone’s jokes and last starred in a much-reviled, Razzie-winning M. Night Shyamalan bomb is going to play some kind of cross-dressing Forrest Gump in a historical satire about slavery. Sure, why not? I mean he’s proved that he has the acting chops for this, right? I can’t envision any way this goes wrong.