Will Smith has an interesting perspective on the sad state of the world and we’re not entirely mad at his logic.
The actor who will star in the upcoming Netflix film, Bright, offered an optimistic outlook on the fate of humanity during a press conference in Beverly Hills on Wednesday.
“In terms of where the world is, I actually have a little bit of a brighter perspective of where we are right now,” he told reporters at the Four Seasons Hotel. “This is the purge. This is the cleanse. This is what happens. This is the natural reaction to the amount of light that came into the world when Barack Obama was the president.”
According to Smith, the overwhelmingly negative rhetoric and social unrest that permeates society right now is only temporary.
“From the Daoist perspective, we had to expect that it was going to go the other way, but it’s going the other way as a purge and as a cleanse. This is the darkness before the dawn. When that thing swings back to the other direction, humanity is going to evolve,” he continued.
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“This is an evolutionary shift in humanity right now and it’s like when we went from the agricultural era to the industrial era into the digital age and I feel very, very strongly that we are shifting into what the next age of humanity is going to be right now. It’s just the shit has to get stirred up. We’re seeing it all. The truth is right in front of us. Nobody is allowed to ignore what’s true anymore. You don’t even get to debate. You can, “alternative facts” but people actually get to look at it for themselves. Hiding is over. So that’s gonna be really interesting to see how humanity reacts to it and it’s gonna be a fucking mess. It’s the mess in the clean up. It’s the mess and the purge before that new real light shows up.”
Smith also pointed out the similarities between our current reality and the world he inhabits in Bright. His character is a human cop at a time when Los Angeles is inhabited by orcs, elves, and fairies and his new partner in the first orc to join the police force.
“Part of what was exciting to me about this role was the Elves represent the ‘haves’ and the Orcs represent the ‘have-nots’ and the humans are actually in the middle. I’m an African American police officer but I’m racist against Orcs, right? So that flip was really fun to play around with. It’s a unique mindset that as an African American man, I’m not in that position often,” he said.
“In one scene, there’s an Orc being beaten by police outside and my character turns to Jacobi and says, ‘I need to know are you an Orc first or a cop first?’ That’s some deep shit. It speaks to a really difficult issue for a black police officer in a black neighborhood or a Latin police officer in a Latin neighborhood. It speaks to a really difficult issue.”
Bright premieres in select theaters and on Netflix on December 22.