Will Smith interview: How starring in King Richard changed the way he parents his children

Third time could be a charm for Will Smith at this year’s Academy Awards, and it would be fitting that he create his own piece of history by playing Richard Williams, the father of history-making tennis siblings, Venus and Serena. Oscar nominations aren’t due to be released until February 8, but the 53-year-old is already considered the frontrunner in the Best Actor field for his role in King Richard, a performance critics are saying is the best of his career. Smith says the polarising patriarch of the Williams family had long been a source of inspiration for him, dating back to a 1994 interview on national TV in the US, where Richard famously cut in after the reporter repeatedly asked a 14-year-old Venus why she was so confident of victory. “Richard Williams snaps on the reporter, and says, ‘Now, she done said what she done said with a whole lot of confidence’,” Smith tells STM, slipping easily into the character he plays in the film. “And I saw that, you know, in real time, and the look on Venus’s face burned an image in my heart, because that’s how I wanted my daughter to look when I showed up; that interview really changed my parenting.” In the past few months, courtesy of excerpts from a new memoir, we’ve learnt a lot more (arguably too much) about Smith, his semi-open marriage to Jada Pinkett Smith and their family life. The star says working on King Richard, which included meetings with Venus and Serena, was a learning process, too. “It wasn’t the standard thing that you see of a parent pushing and driving a child,” Smith says. “There was that, but it was augmenting and throwing fuel on a fire that they had; it was a fire coming from inside of Venus and Serena. “And that was a new parenting idea for me, of aligning with your children versus directing your children . . . and it was a very different approach that was somewhat eye-opening for me, my father was military.” In the aforementioned memoir, Smith writes of his alcoholic, abusive father, but credits his old man for shaping his work ethic. “He listened to every record. He visited every studio. The same intense perfectionism that terrorised his family put food on the table every night of my life,” Smith writes. Whether the actor drew from that experience to create his characterisation of Richard Williams is hard to say, but it’s easy to see a parallel in the oversized presence both fathers have in the lives of their offspring. Now, it might seem odd to tell the story of the Williams sisters from the perspective of their dad, especially if you look at the raw stats from their respective tennis careers. Older sibling Venus has 10 grand slam titles to her name, was the first African-American woman to reach world No.1 in the Open era; has four Olympic gold medals and career prize money in excess of $58 million. As impressive as that is, little sis Serena has achieved even more. Arguably the greatest women’s tennis player of all time, Serena has 23 Slams (only one behind Margaret Court), has been world No.1 for 319 weeks, also won four Olympic gold medals, has 14 grand slam doubles titles (all with Venus) and amassed a staggering $130 million in prize money. Amazingly, this success was almost exactly as their father drew it up, before his daughters were even born. Richard famously got the idea of raising tennis prodigies after watching women’s tennis on TV and, by chance, seeing Romanian tennis player Virginia Ruzici get a cheque for $US40,000, as much as he earned in a year. When wife Oracene wasn’t keen on adding to the couple’s three existing, non-tennis-playing children, Richard wooed her with romantic dinners and rather less romantically hid her birth control pills. With the baby-making under way, he buried his head in tennis magazines to learn everything he could about the game, which would form the basis for a 78-page plan to engineer future champions. The plan included moving the family from the relative safety of California’s Long Beach to Compton, where they’d encounter gang violence on a daily basis, because Richard believed heroes such as Ali and Malcolm X were forged in such tough environments. In one scene in the movie, Smith as Richard is brutally beaten by gang members after they refuse to stop ogling his daughters as they practise on a Compton tennis court. It seems like a classic Hollywood screenwriter’s flourish, but it really did happen. The film is a dramatisation not a documentary, so some liberties with the facts are to be expected, but director Reinaldo Marcus Green’s feature generally honours the truth of its subjects, even if it tends to take a slightly rose-tinted view of Richard. However, given it was made in close consultation with the family, it’s commendable the movie offers a portrait of a complicated man, who is often his own worst enemy. It’s this complexity that gives Smith his best chance yet of putting an Oscars statuette on a mantelpiece that already boasts four Grammys, four MTV Movie Awards, five American Music Awards and six MTV Video Music Awards. If it was up to Serena, the engraver would already be hard at work. “It really is super-surreal for me, and then to have Will play this role as my father, and the way he just embodied Richard Williams, just took the whole film to a whole new level,” the tennis great tells STM. “It’s so emotional, it’s well done and it’s a brilliant piece of work.” It’s also a long way from where Smith started, back in the mid-1980s, as one half of the hip-hop duo, DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince. The big break came when he parlayed a modicum of mainstream success as a rapper into ’90s TV hit The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which catapulted him to the top of the entertainment industry. In a few short years he became the king of the box office, starring in a string of blockbusters — Bad Boys, Independence Day and Men in Black, to name a few — that generated billions of dollars and made him one of the most recognisable people on the planet. But it was recognition of a different kind that became increasingly important to Smith, as he began to choose roles with more obvious appeal to the Oscars voters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Being more selective paid off in 2002, when his performance as US boxing icon Muhammad Ali in Ali earned Smith his first Academy Awards nomination. He was pipped that year by Denzel Washington’s turn in Training Day, who became just the second black man to win Best Actor in the history of the Oscars, after Sidney Poitier’s trailblazing win for The Defiant Ones in 1959. Given how historically rare it is for a person of colour to win an Oscar, it’s ironic Smith’s second nomination, for his lead performance in The Pursuit of Happyness, was also trumped by the only other black Best Actor nominee in 2007, Forrest Whittaker, who played Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland. Smith, of course, is not the first actor to chase Oscars glory — you could accuse Ben Affleck, Brad Pitt and George Clooney of doing the same — but, rightly or wrongly, the Fresh Prince seems to cop more criticism for it. That’s what happens when you star in Collateral Beauty and Seven Pounds, shameless Oscars-bait movies that, in the case of the latter, involved Smith’s character committing suicide in a bathtub full of jellyfish, so others could harvest his organs. Smith’s 2015 biographical drama Concussion was similarly obvious Oscars bait, but featured a fine performance from the actor as pioneering head trauma researcher Dr Bennet Omalu. You’d have to think failing to earn a Best Actor nomination in that instance constituted a snub from the Academy, but this fell in the second consecutive year in which all 20 acting nominees were white, so he wasn’t the only one. The #OscarsSoWhite controversy of that period sparked a raft of changes within the Academy, yet Smith would still become only the fifth black man to win Best Actor since the awards were first held in 1929. Should it happen, one suspects no one would appreciate the history attached to the achievement more than Richard Williams himself, in a “game recognise game” kinda way. For Venus and Serena, seeing their story play out on the big screen is humbling enough, regardless of what happens this awards season. “It’s super emotional,” Venus tells STM. “I think it was amazing to see the family atmosphere on the set, and how much Demi (Singleton) and Saniyya (Sidney) really acted like Serena and I even when the cameras weren’t rolling, like holding hands, it was so sweet. “And I’m just really proud of what everyone has accomplished.” Having learnt firsthand how hard it was to “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee”, Smith is perhaps best qualified to comment on what exactly the 14-year-old Singleton and 15-year-old Sidney accomplished as Serena and Venus, respectively. “When I had to try to learn how to play Muhammad Ali, I know how daunting that was,” he says. “There are professional fighters who can’t move like Muhammad Ali, and there are professional tennis players who can’t, you know, play like Venus and Serena. “And I just want the world to know that not only did Saniyya learn how to play like Venus, Saniyya is left-handed (and Venus is right-handed) . . . so she learnt to play like one of the greatest tennis players of all time with her off hand.” While the Williams sisters would love to see the man who plays their dad honoured for his performance, the real goal here is a continuation of what they’ve done their entire careers — inspire others. And not strictly in a sporting sense. “What I really loved about this is that it’s a family film,” Venus says. “If you don’t even understand tennis, you understand family, and that with a family you can do anything. “Some of us are born with that, some of us have to create those families, but surrounding yourself with family can take you higher.” Serena agrees. “Venus put it perfectly, really,” she says. “You really do have to ultimately just believe in yourself and anything is possible; if you set your goals at the sky, the sky is literally the limit, so don’t be afraid to set high goals.” If Smith achieves his goal of winning an Academy Award, expect him to give credit where credit is due in his acceptance speech. “It was a beautiful honour and an absolute pleasure to bring this depiction to the world,” he says. “So thank you, (Venus and Serena), for your suffering, thank you for your hard work and thank you for your inspiration to the world — we appreciate you.” King Richard is in cinemas January 13.

Will Smith interview: How starring in King Richard changed the way he parents his children

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