Will Smith

Will Smith (born 25 September 1968) is an American actor, rapper and film producer who rose to fame through music and television before becoming one of Hollywood’s most successful leading actors. Born Willard Carroll Smith II in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he grew up in the Wynnefield neighbourhood of West Philadelphia. His mother, Caroline Bright, worked for the Philadelphia school board, while his father, Willard Carroll Smith Sr., was a refrigeration engineer and business owner. Smith attended Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School before continuing his education at Overbrook High School, where he developed his interest in music and performing. He began rapping as a teenager and formed the duo DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince with local DJ Jeffrey Townes. Their success during the late 1980s, including the first Grammy Award presented for a rap performance, gave Smith a career in entertainment before he had turned twenty.

Smith’s move into acting came when he was offered the starring role in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (1990–1996), a sitcom loosely inspired by his own experiences and musical persona. The series follows a teenager from West Philadelphia who moves to the wealthy Los Angeles neighbourhood of Bel-Air to live with relatives. Although the story takes place in Bel-Air, the exterior of the Banks family’s mansion was filmed at a residential property on North Bristol Avenue in Brentwood, several kilometres west of the fictional setting. The interior scenes were produced on sound stages in Hollywood and Burbank, including NBC Studios. The series established Smith in Los Angeles and provided the foundation for his subsequent film career.

His early dramatic work included Six Degrees of Separation (1993), in which he portrayed a young con artist who enters the lives of wealthy New Yorkers. The film made extensive use of Manhattan locations, including Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Fifth Avenue. A luxury apartment at 1049 Fifth Avenue was used for the residence of the Kittredge family, while the exterior of another building at 860 Fifth Avenue represented their address. Other New York locations included Lincoln Center and the Rainbow Room, with additional production work planned in Toronto. The film marked an important departure from Smith’s television comedy background.

His breakthrough as an action film star came with Bad Boys (1995), directed by Michael Bay and co-starring Martin Lawrence. The film was shot extensively in Miami and Miami Beach, with locations including the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, the Art Deco district of South Beach and the Alfred I. duPont Building in downtown Miami, which was converted into a police station for the production. The Tides Hotel on Ocean Drive and a building on Park Avenue in Miami Beach also appeared in the film, while the climactic confrontation was filmed at Opa-locka Airport. Smith returned to Miami for several sequels, establishing one of the longest-running film franchises of his career.

Independence Day (1996) took Smith into large-scale science fiction, playing fighter pilot Steven Hiller during an alien invasion of Earth. Although the film depicts destruction across American cities, many of its scenes were filmed far from the places represented on screen. The former Kaiser Steel plant in Fontana, California, was used for the devastated streets of Los Angeles, while Wendover Airport in Utah stood in for military installations, including the secret Area 51 facility in Nevada. The surrounding desert landscapes of Utah and Nevada were used for other military sequences.

Smith subsequently starred opposite Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black (1997), which turned New York City into the centre of a secret organisation monitoring extraterrestrial activity. One of the film’s most recognisable locations is the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel ventilation building in Lower Manhattan, which serves as the exterior of the organisation’s headquarters. Other locations included Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in Queens, where the Unisphere features prominently in the climactic confrontation, and Liberty State Park in Jersey City, New Jersey, used for the scene in which Agent J helps deliver an alien baby. The film also used locations in Greenwich Village and California, including Big Sky Ranch in Simi Valley.

In Michael Mann’s Ali (2001), Smith portrayed heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali, a performance that earned him his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. The production followed Ali’s career across several American cities and into Africa. Filming took place in Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami and New York, while Maputo in Mozambique was used to recreate Kinshasa, the capital of what was then Zaire, during the events surrounding the 1974 Rumble in the Jungle. One memorable sequence was filmed in the Mavalane district of Maputo, where Smith, portraying Ali, runs through the streets surrounded by local children. Additional African filming took place in Ghana, including Accra.

For I, Robot (2004), Smith played detective Del Spooner in a futuristic Chicago of 2035. Despite its Chicago setting, the film was produced largely in Vancouver, British Columbia, where modern buildings and urban infrastructure were transformed into the fictional city. Locations included the British Columbia Institute of Technology, Central City shopping centre in Surrey and the Cassiar Tunnel. Additional filming took place in Chicago and at the Dumont Dunes in California, demonstrating how the production combined several geographically distant locations to create a single futuristic setting.

The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) returned Smith to a more realistic American urban environment. He portrayed Chris Gardner, a struggling salesman attempting to raise his young son in San Francisco during the early 1980s. Smith’s own son Jaden made his feature film debut playing Gardner’s son. The production filmed throughout San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area, including the historic GLIDE Memorial Church on Ellis Street, where Gardner and his son seek shelter. The Bay Area Rapid Transit system was particularly important to the production. Filming took place at Powell Street and Balboa Park stations in San Francisco, as well as the 12th Street and 19th Street stations in Oakland. The production spent seventeen days filming on BART property, temporarily replacing modern advertisements and station maps to recreate the early 1980s. However, the scene in which Gardner and his son spend the night in a station toilet was filmed on a reconstructed set in Alameda rather than inside an actual station bathroom.

New York City became the setting for one of Smith’s most demanding location shoots in I Am Legend (2007). Playing scientist Robert Neville, apparently one of the last survivors of a global catastrophe, he filmed on streets that had to be closed and transformed into an abandoned metropolis. Production locations included Washington Square Park, Fifth Avenue, Grand Central Terminal, St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the USS Intrepid. The exterior of Neville’s Greenwich Village home was filmed on location, while its interior was constructed inside the Marcy Avenue Armory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The evacuation sequence on the Brooklyn Bridge required six nights of filming, extensive traffic closures and hundreds of extras. The production also used locations in New Jersey, including Lambertville for scenes near the film’s conclusion.

Smith worked with his son Jaden again in After Earth (2013), directed by M. Night Shyamalan. The science fiction film takes place on a future Earth abandoned by humanity, with the production using several very different landscapes to depict the planet. Much of the outdoor filming took place in Humboldt Redwoods State Park in Northern California, where ancient redwood forests provided the enormous trees seen throughout the film. Additional scenes were filmed around La Fortuna and Arenal Volcano in Costa Rica, as well as in Utah. The production also brought Smith back to the Philadelphia area, where much of the studio work was completed at Sun Center Studios in Aston, Pennsylvania. The elaborate spacecraft interiors were constructed there, including a large set mounted on hydraulics to simulate the movement of a crashing spaceship.

In Concussion (2015), Smith portrayed Nigerian-born forensic pathologist Dr Bennet Omalu, whose research linked American football injuries to chronic traumatic encephalopathy. The film was set and largely shot in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where Omalu conducted his research. Filming locations included the Braddock Carnegie Library, downtown Pittsburgh and Altius restaurant in the Mount Washington neighbourhood. Smith subsequently appeared as Deadshot in Suicide Squad (2016), a superhero film set in the fictional Midway City but filmed primarily in Toronto, Ontario. The production used streets and buildings across downtown Toronto, including Yonge Street and Adelaide Street, to create its American comic-book setting.

His later career included two particularly international productions released in 2019. In Disney’s live-action Aladdin (2019), Smith played the Genie, with the fictional Arabian city of Agrabah constructed largely at Longcross Studios in Surrey and Arborfield Studios in Berkshire, England. The production also travelled to Jordan, where the desert landscape of Wadi Rum provided exterior scenery. In Ang Lee’s Gemini Man (2019), Smith played both an ageing assassin and his younger clone. Filming took place in Georgia, Colombia and Hungary. The historic centre of Cartagena, Colombia, provided the setting for a major motorcycle chase through the city’s colonial streets and fortifications, while Budapest locations included Széchenyi Thermal Bath, Heroes’ Square, Fisherman’s Bastion and Matthias Church.

Smith received the Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of Richard Williams, the father and tennis coach of Venus and Serena Williams, in King Richard (2021). The film was set and shot largely in the Los Angeles area, including Compton, where the Williams sisters grew up. A residential property on East Piru Street was used for the exterior of the Williams family home, while tennis training scenes were filmed at Leon H. Washington Park in the Watts area of Los Angeles. Smith’s subsequent historical drama Emancipation (2022), in which he portrayed an enslaved man escaping through the Louisiana swamps during the American Civil War, was filmed at locations around New Orleans and St. Francisville, including Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site and Ardoyne Plantation near Houma.

Smith returned to his long-running role as Miami detective Mike Lowrey in Bad Boys: Ride or Die (2024), alongside Martin Lawrence. Although the film remains closely associated with Miami, much of the production was based in Atlanta, Georgia, where streets, buildings and studio facilities were used for scenes set in Florida. The film also incorporated actual Miami locations, continuing the franchise’s connection to South Florida almost thirty years after the original Bad Boys.

Outside acting, Smith has maintained connections with both his birthplace and the Los Angeles area. He co-founded the production company Overbrook Entertainment with James Lassiter, naming it after Overbrook, the Philadelphia neighbourhood associated with his childhood and high school. Smith and his brother Harry also formerly owned commercial property in Philadelphia’s Old City, selling an office building on South Fourth Street in 2002. Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith have owned several properties in Southern California, including a large estate in the Santa Monica Mountains near Calabasas, as well as homes in Hidden Hills. Their real estate holdings have also included properties in Pennsylvania and Hawaii. In March 2025, Philadelphia officially renamed the 2000 block of North 59th Street, near Overbrook High School, Will Smith Way in recognition of his career and his connection to West Philadelphia.

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