Will Smith’s farts were so powerful that ‘Men in Black’ set was evacuated, director says

Will Smith: Oscar winner, music superstar, dynasty patriarch…and little stinker?

Smith and costar Tommy Lee Jones were sitting alone in a futuristic hypercar while filming a Men in Black scene, filmmaker Barry Sonnenfeld recounted in an interview with Kelly Ripa on her podcast Let’s Talk Off Camera.

“We have to bring a ladder over on wheels like the old days when you would get on airplanes from the tarmac, and we get them up there and we put them in the thing and we turn it upside down, and we’re ready to shoot,” the director recalled. “And they’re hermetically sealed in this space, and there are locks to prevent it from opening and falling. I say ‘Roll camera, and I hear Will Smith go, ‘Oh, Jesus. So sorry. Tommy, so sorry. Baz, get the ladder!'”

Sonnenfeld said that Jones reacted to Smith calmly. “You hear Tommy saying, ‘That’s fine, Will. No worries, Will. Don’t worry, Will,'” he recalled. “I don’t know what’s going on. So we race the ladder over. Tommy reaches his leg out as the ladder is coming over, races down the stairs.”

The source of the emergency: “Will Smith is a farter,” Sonnenfeld said. “Some people are. And you really don’t wanna be inside a very small hermetically sealed space with a Will Smith fart. You don’t even wanna be sitting next to him at the Disney ranch.”

The stench was so potent that the cast and crew cleared the area. “We evacuated the stage for, about 3 hours,” Sonnenfeld recalled. “He’s, you know, a lovely guy. Just, he farts.”

After Ripa asked if Smith was on a protein-heavy diet that might have caused his flatulence, Sonnenfeld said, “Well, I don’t think he’ll eat a lot of carbohydrates. I’ll tell you that. I spent four or five days at his place in Calabasas, and we pretty much had boiled chicken and sliced tomatoes for five days.”

Sonnenfeld also took the opportunity to share a memory about Smith’s house. “I made fun of him because he showed me his plans when he was building it, and I said, ‘What’s that room?'” the filmmaker recalled. “I still make fun of Will. Will said, ‘Oh, that’s my accolade room.'”

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Sonnenfeld said Smith explained the room as a space “for the MTV Awards and all the awards.” However, the filmmaker is uncertain whether the superstar still maintains his awards shrine. “I don’t know if he ever went through with it because I made so much fun of him,” he said. “He may have done away with the accolade room, but he had one for a while.”

Smith and Sonnenfeld first worked together on the original Men in Black in 1997. The farts weren’t a deal-breaker in their professional relationship, however; they reteamed in 1999 for Wild Wild West, then collaborated on two MIB sequels in 2002 and 2012. 

Listen to the full conversation between Sonnenfeld and Ripa above.