Will Smith’s “Emancipation” Co-Star Ben Foster Didn’t Speak To Him At All During Production

When I heard Will Smith was making his triumphant return to the big screen in another movie about slavery I immediately became uninterested. But Will still needs damage control after the incident we shall now refer to as Slap-A-Ho Day, and apparently, Emancipation is getting rave reviews. Now, Will has overthrown his wife Jada Pinkett-Smith‘s hosting gig on her Facebook show Red Table Talk to bore his children to tears as he discusses how his co-star Ben Foster got all method on him by ignoring him the entire six months of production.

According to People, Will really wants us to remember he’s still the quintessential Guy Next Door and not the guy who deserves to be spit on.  And he did this by having a discussion with his children Trey, Jaden, and Willow about Emancipation. During Will’s Red Table Talk Takeover, he discusses how Ben completely ignored him outside of filming in an attempt to get into character. In the beginning, this confused Will. The heavens open up when he smiles, and people sigh with relief when he keeps his hands to himself. So he couldn’t understand what the hell was wrong with Ben at first.

“In my mind, I was giving my best ‘Will Smith,’ ” the actor says, “and Ben just walked past me and didn’t say nothing. I was like, ‘Oh, he must not have seen me.’ Then for six months he didn’t speak to me. He didn’t make eye contact with me. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t acknowledge me for six months.”

“But what he did that first day,” Will continues, “I was like, ‘Yup. Got it: We’re not playing. This is real; this is serious. We’re not fooling around with these ideas.’ I really credit Ben for clicking me into the next gear of depth and focus.”

Eventually, on the last day of filming, Ben finally introduced himself to Will. Then, at Emancipation‘s premiere, Ben was finally able to gush about how much he admired Will, and it sounds more like wedding vows than words of praise for a former co-worker.

At the Los Angeles premiere of Emancipation on Nov. 30, Foster told PEOPLE, “[I’ve] been a fan of Will Smith for a long time, so it was an honor to work with him and he’s done some of the finest work, I believe, of his career.”

He added of Will’s star power: “It’s like, how do you describe a sunset? How do you describe the stars? Some people just have the thing. But what I saw was him going deeper than I’ve ever seen before.”

I’m sure the part about Will going “deeper” meant he dug deep into his pockets to make Ben regurgitate this manufactured line of drivel. “How do you describe the stars“? Ben, please. Someone give him an Oscar for that interview and not for this movie because there can’t be any scene in Emancipation that mimics that much dedication to scripted words.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=699286248274382

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