“The entire world was in lockdown, watched what happened to George Floyd, and stood up with one voice and said, We see it. Yet when Smith took the film to studios last year, George Floyd had died and the world had changed. I understood what it was to try to mold a young mind, how it’s different with sons than it is with daughters.”Įmancipation is an even bigger swing, the kind of big-budget script that often lingers in preproduction for years, if not decades. “So when I first read, I understood what it’s like to want your kids to succeed. “Richard Williams is a lot like my father,” Smith explained to me. Smith’s portrayal, Serena added, was so convincing that there were moments she had to remind herself that it wasn’t actually her father on the screen. They think, How do we break them? My dad anticipated that, but he would not allow himself or his family to be broken.” “You see, when someone is different-when they don’t act or look how a person assumed they would-the first reaction is often fear. “My dad was and still is way before his time,” Serena Williams told me in an email. Smith plays him as a crotchety, unbending, but fiercely loving parent. The irascible Williams trained both daughters with balls collected from the tennis clubs he couldn’t get into, and protected them from the grind of tennis and the media in a way that makes him look like a prophet of the current moment in which athletes like Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles prioritize their agency and mental health. In the grand Smith tradition, it’s an inspiring story of triumph over adversity that contains an affecting character study.
That means making movies like King Richard, directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green and due in theaters this November, in which Smith portrays Richard Williams, the eccentric, hard-nosed father of Venus and Serena.
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