Will Smith Recalls Terrifying Moment He “Went Too Far” Filming ‘Emancipation’: “I Wanted to Feel the Degradation of Slavery”

Will Smith recalled a harrowing experience he had while filming Emancipation, his Apple TV+ drama inspired by the real life story of an enslaved man.

While appearing on Hart to Heart, the actor admitted to host Kevin Hart that he “went too far” while playing the character of Peter, a runaway slave who escapes from plantation owners through the swamps of Louisiana.

Peter was partially based on the life of Gordon, an enslaved man who whose back was photographed to show the brutalities of slavery; the image of his severe scarring from whipping helped garner support for the abolitionist movement.

“Just bringing it up, I start to get teary,” Smith told Hart. “I wanted to feel the degradation of slavery, and I went too far in. That level of human brutality, what we would do to each other… I had the chains on my neck and we were working. I wanted the real weight of them. I wanted real chains. They got old chains and they put it on my neck and they were fitting it for size and the prop master went to put the key in and the key didn’t work.”

The actor recalled exactly how it felt to feel the weight of those chains in that moment as he willed himself to relax.

“I’m standing there and they’re running around and they couldn’t get me out of it,” Smith continued. “I’m standing there in those chains, right on that hyperventilating edge.”

He said he realized, “Peter, the character, no one was running around to get him out. So I just kept falling deeper and deeper into that understanding.”

The actor went on to describe what it was like “coming face to face with that level of atrocity” every day during filming. While he called his co-stars “very, very good,” Smith previously spoke about the difficulties he experienced while filming the movie, including one moment someone ad-libbed a scene where he got spit on.

He recalled the moment during an appearance on Red Table Talk, the Facebook series his wife Jada Pinkett Smith hosted that has since been canceled. “I was like, ‘Woah, every actor on this set was taking it really, really seriously,'” he recalled.

But Smith maintained to Hart that working on the film was such a moving experience that he “wouldn’t give it back.”

“It was one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had as an actor. Peter introduced me to God,” he said. “My faith got solid after working on that movie.”

Emancipation is now streaming on Apple TV+.