10 Actors Who Rightly Turned Down Iconic Roles
8. Will Smith - Neo (The Matrix)
Tied arguably with John Wick, playing Neo in The Matrix was probably the biggest role of Keanu Reeves’ career. However, Will Smith was very nearly the one, not Keanu.
Will Smith has awesome staying power as well as star power, managing to be one of the biggest names in Hollywood for over a decade. He still draws a crowd these days, but from the mid ‘90s to the late ‘00s, there wasn’t really anyone bigger.
So when the Wachowski’s went to Warner Brothers with The Matrix, Warner Brothers went straight to Smith. Unfortunately for him (but fortunately for those of us who love Keanu in the role), he didn’t understand the script at all, and so gave it a hard pass.
In Smith’s defence, the script was originally more complicated, so much so that Warner Brothers didn’t even get it. Neo was originally supposed to gender flip outside the matrix (the whole movie is a transition parable), and the ‘humans as batteries’ was originally a harder to grasp but more logical ‘human synapses running a super computer’ angle.
By rejecting The Matrix, Smith instead picked up the messy Wild Wild West, although that disaster didn’t damage his career any.