Will Smith visited San Diego Comic-Con on Thursday to promote his upcoming Netflix movie Bright (and not to announce Wild Wild West 2: Can’t Stand the Heat, as I was led to believe). But he also took some time to discuss the viral photo where he looks like Uncle Phil from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
It’s true what they say: time eventually makes Uncle Phils out of all of us.
“It is such a new world,” Smith said when asked about the picture where he’s bungee jumping from the Victoria Falls bridge. “I released my first record in ’86, so I’m over 30 years in the business. My first album there were no CDs, so it wasn’t until my second album, and they came like these hot new things called CDs. Seeing that transition, essentially the fans being more and more involved in the creative process. In terms of movie stars, it’s a huge difference. It’s like you almost can’t make new movies stars anymore.”
He continued, “It’s like there’s a certain amount of privacy and there was a certain amount of distance that you had from the audience, and only on July 4th did you have access. So that amount of access created this bigger-than-life kind of thing. But in the shift into this new world, it’s almost like a friendship with the fans. The relationship is less like the time of Madonna, Michael Jackson, when you could make the Tom Cruise these gigantic figures, because you can’t create that anymore. The shift is to ‘we’re best friends,’ and that’s like with the comments and with those pictures and all that.”
That’s a surprisingly deep answer for a silly question about bungee jumping and an early ’90s sitcom. No one ask Smith about the saddest scene in Fresh Prince history. He might talk for hours. Also, I’ll start crying again.
(Via the Huffington Post)