Nearly 30 years after its release, Men in Black remains one of Will Smith’s best movies, though it took some convincing from Steven Spielberg for him to sign on. There’s a lot to enjoy from the Malibu Comics adaptation, from the dynamic between Smith’s Agent J and Tommy Lee Jones’ Agent K, to how the movie’s various aliens were realized with practical and CGI effects. What wasn’t so enjoyable during the making of Men in Black, however, was the time Smith let out a fart that was so bad, it resulted in the set being evacuated for three hours.
This gas of a story comes to us from Men in Black director Barry Sonnenfeld, who stopped by Let’s Talk Off Camera to plug his new book, Best Possible Place, Worst Possible Time, which is filled with stories from his film and TV career. During the episode, Sonnfeld recalled to host Kelly Ripa about the time he and the Men in Black crew were getting ready to shoot Smith and Jones (whom the director said “does not suffer fools”) in a device that functioned as a car turning into a “hyper car.” The actors had to get into this device via the kind of ladders you’d find at an airport tarmac, and then they were “hermetically sealed” in.
The actors being locked in was done for safety reasons so that they wouldn’t fall out of the device, but there was an unfortunate consequence to this. Sonnenfeld heard Will Smith apologizing to Tommy Lee Jones and asked for someone named Baz to get a ladder, and Jones was simply telling Smith not to worry about what had happened (as opposed to saying he didn’t sanction his buffoonery). The actors were removed from the device and Jones raced “down the stairs” to exit the scene. As Sonnenfeld explained:
What happened was, Will Smith is a farter. It’s just some people are, and you really don’t want to be inside a very small hermetically sealed space with a Will Smith fart. You don’t even want to be sitting next to him at the Disney ranch.
While I’m not going to shame Will Smith for being a farmer, I also have to side with Tommy Lee Jones on this. If you’re an enclosed space like that and someone lets one rip, that’s just a brutal experience. Fortunately, it sounds like it didn’t take too long to get the actors free, but the tradeoff was production grinding to a screeching halt. As Barry Sonnenfeld put it:
We evacuated the stage for about three hours, and that’s incredible. He’s a lovely guy, just he farts. Some do, some don’t.
This is perhaps the biggest piece of fart-related news in the entertainment industry since Whoopi Goldberg was accused of farting the most out of all The View hosts in 2023. As far as Will Smith goes, though, it sounds like this was just one regrettable incident, and his toots didn’t pose any more problems during the making of Men in Black. He and Jones went on to play J and K in two more Men in Black movies, which Barry Sonnenfeld also directed. In 2019, a spinoff called Men in Black: International was released, but that Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson-led flick failed to impress critically and commercially.
As of this writing, you’ll need to be on Sling TV if you’d like to stream the first three Men in Black movies. Will Smith was seen earlier this year in Bad Boys: Ride or Die, and he’s one of the producers attached to the next Karate Kid movie, which is set for a May release on the 2025 movies schedule.
