Will Smith’s upcoming YouTube series, Best Shape of My Life, will not be a typical, light-hearted ride-along with a middle-aged movie star as he tries to shed a few pounds. What starts with some jokey images of belly flab and comments about his mega-cut appearance in I, Robot quickly turns more serious. In the new trailer, which also touches on his forthcoming book, the A-lister alludes to a time in his life that he “considered suicide.”
He speaks those words at a table surrounded by his visibly concerned family. He is later seen at the same table (but wearing a different shirt) dabbing his eyes and muttering “damn.”
Shooting for the fitness series coincided with Smith writing his heavily-anticipated memoir, Will. “It’s exposing my life and so many things that people don’t know about me,” he says about the book in the short clip. A clinical psychologist named Dr. Ramani Durvasula says that Smith is embarking on “two extraordinary difficult journeys,” referring to the autobiography and his push to lose 20 lbs in 20 weeks. The trailer shows Smith reaching a breaking point: Amid barbells and workout equipment, he turns to the camera and says, “I don’t want to do any of this,” and that he is “finished” with the series.
In what sounds as if Smith is reading an excerpt from Will’s completed draft, he says: “What you have come to understand as ‘Will Smith,’ the alien-annihilating emcee, the bigger-than-life movie star, is largely a construction, a carefully crafted and honed character designed to protect myself, to hide myself from the world, to hide the coward.”
Last summer, Smith and his wife Jada Pinkett Smith joked through tears about their “bad marriage for life” on a very unusual episode of Red Table Talk.
Will Smith: The Best Shape Of My Life debuts on YouTube on November 8 with six episodes.
The phone number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255.
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