“He fell to his knees”: Will Smith Can Never Forget the Gruesome Workout for His 1 Movie by Ferrari Director That Pushed Him to His Limits

Will Smith’s Ali is one of the most pioneering roles of his career, which even earned him a nod from the Academy Awards. Actors usually have to go through hard training and serious conditioning to prepare for their roles. This is especially true if one is venturing into method acting.

Noted film director Michael Mann generally demands a lot from his actors. He requires them to become one with the character in such a way that they become indistinguishable. So, when Michael Mann took on the herculean task of portraying the legendary fighter Muhammad Ali’s life on screen, he made sure Will Smith was up to the task. 

Will Smith had to undergo a brutal training regime for his movie Ali that literally brought him down to his knees and pushed the actor to his limits. Giving a behind-the-scenes of the movie in an interview, Darrell Foster opens up about the gruesome struggle The Fresh Prince of Bell Air actor had to go through. 

Boxing Trainer shares brutal workout plan for Will Smith’s Ali that made the actor “fell to his knees”

Boxers go through extreme physical and mental challenges during their careers. According to statistics, around 20% of boxers sustain a brain injury of some sort during their career. One can take for example, Muhammad Ali himself, who suffered a broken jaw and an estimated 29 thousand blows to the head during his career.

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Muhammad Ali had a legendary match with Joe Frazier in which he fought 15 rounds. Will Smith was supposed to recreate that on screen. To understand what Muhammad Ali went through, Michael Mann hired boxer trainer Darrell Foster to not only train Will Smith but also to make him understand how Muhammad Ali persevered during that match. While talking to NME, legendary trainer Darrell Foster, who has previously coached Sugar Ray Leonard,  Woody Harrelson, Antonio Banderas, and Eddie Murphy, opened up about how he took Will Smith 10,000 feet up a rocky mountain to recreate the feeling of fighting without being able to breathe.

“I took Will up to 10,000 feet in Aspen, Colorado so he could understand what it felt like to experience oxygen deprivation in order to correlate it to how Ali felt in the 14th round with [former world heavyweight champion] Joe Frazier and how it feels to actually not be able to breathe and you’ve still gotta keep fighting. I made Will run and throw punches. He fell to his knees and I made him write Ali’s name in the snow. And he said: ‘Now I get it.’”

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While it does not come close to what Ali went through during his world-class fight, it still shows how far Will Smith and Michael Mann were willing to go to faithfully portray Muhammad Ali on the screen. Such perseverance will serve as an inspiration to many actors for generations to come. 

Muhammad Ali Visited Will Smith on the Set to “harass Will” Smith

Sharing more insight into the behind-the-scenes of Ali, Darrell Foster opened up and gave an interesting nugget of information. Apparently, Muhammad Ali himself used to visit the sets of Ali to coach Will Smith to sound more like him. Muhammad Ali only visited the set three or four times, but according to Foster, he did so just to harass Will Smith. 

“He was on set maybe three or four times, mainly to harass Will. He was mainly there to teach Will to improve his dialogue. He’d often go, ‘No man that don’t sound like me.’ He’d say, ‘It’s Joe Fraaazier, Fraaazier’.” Foster shared.”

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Ali dealt with the life of Muhammad Ali between 1964 and 1974, which highlighted his capture of the heavyweight title from Sonny Liston, his conversion to Islam, criticism of the Vietnam War, his banishment from boxing, his legendary fight with Joe Frazier when he returned in 1971, and, finally, his reclaiming the title from George Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle fight of 1974. The movie failed at the box office as it made only $87 million worldwide against a budget of $118 million, but it received glorifying reviews from critics. 

Ali is available to watch on Prime Videos.