Will Smith's fart led to the evacuation of the Men in Black set

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

Smith and co-star Tommy Lee Jones sat alone in a futuristic hypercar while filming a movie Men in Black scene, filmmaker Barry Sonnenfeld told Kelly Ripa in an interview on her podcast Let's talk off camera.

“We have to bring over a ladder on wheels, like you used to get on planes from the tarmac, and we bring it over there, put it in the thing and turn it upside down, and we're ready to shoot,” recalled the director. “And they are hermetically sealed in this room, and there are locks to prevent it from opening and falling. I say 'roll camera,' and I hear Will Smith say, 'Oh, my God. I am so sorry. Tommy, I'm so sorry. Baz, get the ladder!'”

Sonnenfeld said Jones responded calmly to Smith. “You hear Tommy say, ‘That’s OK, Will. Don't worry, Will. Don't worry, Will,'” he recalled. “I don't know what's going on. So we race over the ladder. Tommy sticks his leg out as the ladder comes over and runs down the stairs.”

The cause of the emergency: “Will Smith is a farter,” Sonnenfeld said. “Some people do that. And you really don't want to be in a very small, hermetically sealed room with a Will Smith fart. You don’t even want to sit next to him at the Disney ranch.”

The stench was so strong that the cast and crew evacuated the area. “We evacuated the stage for about three hours,” Sonnenfeld remembers. “He's, you know, a nice guy. He just farts.”

After Ripa asked if Smith was eating a high-protein diet that might have caused his bloating, Sonnenfeld said, “Well, I don't think he's going to eat a lot of carbs. I'm telling you that. I stayed at his house in Calabasas for four or … five days, and we basically had cooked chicken and sliced ​​tomatoes for five days.”

Sonnenfeld also took the opportunity to share a memory of Smith's home. “I made fun of him because when he was building it, he showed me his plans and I asked, 'What kind of room is this?'” the filmmaker remembers. “I still make fun of Will. Will said, 'Oh, this is my awards room.'”

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Sonnenfeld said Smith explained the room as a room “for the MTV Awards and all the awards.” However, the filmmaker is not sure if the superstar still retains his award shrine. “I don’t know if he ever went through that because I made fun of him so much,” he said. “He may have gotten rid of the awards room, but he’s had one for a while.”

Smith and Sonnenfeld initially worked together on the original Men in Black in 1997. However, the farts were not a deciding factor in their professional relationship; They teamed up again in 1999 Wild Wild Westthen worked on two MIB Sequels in 2002 and 2012.

Listen to the full conversation between Sonnenfeld and Ripa above.