At last, Will Smith explains why he turned down the part. Do you believe him?
Quentin Tarantino originally went to Will Smith to play Django in Django Unchained, and that would have been a brilliant bit of casting. The globe's most beloved, safest black superstar shooting a white lady in cold blood? Amazing!
But Smith passed on the part, and now he has given Entertainment Weekly his official reasoning. I almost buy this:
Django wasn’t the lead, so it was like, I need to be the lead. The other character was the lead! I was like, ‘No, Quentin, please, I need to kill the bad guy!
It's interesting to hear a big Hollywood star be open about something like that - he has to be the top guy in the movie, he can't share the spotlight. Of course that's an enormous misreading of Django Unchained on every level, but I also believe that Smith sort of simply didn't get the script.
I think there's more behind Smith's passing on the part, including the fact that he was uncomfortable with some of the film's racial aspects and that he wanted to have a rewrite done, but that goofy quote does seem to sum up enough of it.
http://badassdigest.com/2013/03/25/w...ngo-unchained/