Will Smith says Emancipation co-star Ben Foster didn’t make eye contact with him for six months while filming

In the new film, Foster plays a slave hunter who is chasing Smith’s character down

Will Smith has discussed the intensity of the six-month shoot for his latest film, the slavery drama Emancipation.

In the movie, directed by Antoine Fuqua, Smith plays a slave called Peter who escapes captivity and goes to fight with Abraham Lincoln’s army during the American Civil War.

Ben Foster stars as a slave hunter who relentlessly pursues Smith’s character through the swamps of Louisiana.

Speaking in the latest episode of Red Table Talk, Smith explained how, on the first day of the shoot, Foster blanked him – an approach that Smith had a lot of respect for.

“Ben just walked past me and didn’t say nothing,” he said. “I was like, ‘Oh, he must not have seen me.’ And then for six months he didn’t speak to me, he didn’t make eye contact with me, he didn’t say a word. He didn’t acknowledge me for six months.

“But what he did that first day, I was like, ‘Yup, got it.’ We’re not playing. This is real. This is serious. We’re not fooling around with these ideas. I really credit Ben for clicking me into the next gear of depth and focus.”

Smith then talked about how, on the final day of the shoot, Foster came over to the monitor to look at a shot with Smith and Fuqua for the first time. “He watches the shot and Antoine says, ‘I’m happy. We got it,’” recalled Smith.

“Then I look over at Ben, it’s the last day, and he [extends his hand] and says, ‘Nice to meet you.’”

Will Smith and Ben Foster in ‘Emancipation' (Apple TV+)

Through tears of laughter, Smith added: “We had been through that whole movie together. And the whole time he wasn’t going to his trailer, he was staying in his character tent all day long and he had all his stuff in his character tent.”

Smith said that, months after production wrapped and the two actors came back together to do press, he felt like he didn’t know Foster. “I was like, ‘Who are you? You kind soul, you,’” said Smith.

A clip of Foster, meanwhile, was shown, in which he said: “I’m blown away by what Will Smith did in this film... we must reflect on our past in order to meet our current day and our current day is rife with frightening similarities to what happened during this true story, when that took place.”

Elsewhere in the Red Table Talk episode, Smith recalled being stuck in chains for 15 minutes as crew frantically searched for keys, and how one Emancipation co-star spat on him during an improvised take.

Read The Independent’s review of the movie here, and find out what Fuqua had to say about working with Smith, and the Oscars slap, here.