Columbia Pictures
Movie sets are a high-stress environment where production runs the risk of being interrupted by an unexpected issue at any moment, and the filming of Men in Black apparently encountered a bit of a setback after Will Smith unleashed a particularly heinous fart.
Will Smith had already made a name for himself as a rapper and the star of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air when he decided to turn his attention to movies, and he took Hollywood by storm in the mid-1990s with starring roles in Bad Boy and Independence Day before cementing himself as one of the most bankable rising stars in the industry thanks to Men In Black.
That movie—which raked in close to $600 million at the global box office and spawned three sequels—was directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, who recently recounted a hiccup that transpired during filming on an episode of Kelly Ripa’s Let’s Talk Off Camera podcast.
The tale in question concerns the scene where Smith’s Agent J and Tommy Lee Jones’s Agent K deploy the “little red button” in their car to activate the afterburners that help them avoid traffic, which required the construction of a special rig the two actors were “hermetically sealed” in while the scene was being filmed.
As Sonnenfeld recalled, things took a turn for the worse when they were about to start shooting a take, saying:
“I hear Will Smith go, ‘Oh Jesus, so sorry. Tommy. So sorry. Baz, get the ladder.’ And you hear Tommy saying, ‘That’s fine, Will. No worries, Will. Don’t worry, Will.’ Anyway, I don’t know what’s gone on, right?
“So we race the ladder over. Tommy reaches his leg out as the ladder is coming over, races down the stairs. And what happened was, Will Smith is a farter…and you really don’t want to be inside a very small hermetically sealed space with a Will Smith fart…
We evacuated the stage for about three hours. And that’s incredible. No, he’s, you know, a lovely guy. Just, he farts. Some do, some don’t.”
Well done, Will. Well done.