Will Smith has finally returned to the awards show circuit, making his first on-stage appearance and acceptance speech since “the slap” at the African-American Film Critics Association Awards on Wednesday.
Fuqua took a moment to explain its significance, noting that it “is intended to highlight films that are tackling challenging subjects with insight, enlightening, as well as engaging the audience.”
When Smith took to the stage, he described the project as “the most individual difficult film” of his career, saying that he found it challenging as a performer to “transport” his modern brain to the mentality of living in that time of American slavery.
“It’s difficult to imagine that, that level of inhumanity,” he said.
He then shared a moment from the filming that unfortunately helped him a bit to find that inner place of understanding of what it might have been like to be Black in such an era of injustice.
Smith portrays Peter in the film, an enslaved man who never gives up on his dream of freedom. The character is an amalgamation of real individuals largely based on a famous photograph of a man’s back covered in whipped scars.