Will Smith headlines Gemini Man as Henry Brogan, an elite assassin, who is suddenly targeted and pursued by a mysterious young operative that seemingly can predict his every move – because the latter seems to be Brogan’s younger self.
For top Hollywood action film producer Jerry Bruckheimer, there was no doubt in his mind who would portray not only Brogan – the world-weary government assassin whose decision to retire triggers an incredible series of events – but also Junior, his 23-year-old clone, who is determined to assassinate the assassin. It would be the man with whom he had worked three times in the previous 20 years, Will Smith.
Smith himself was immediately compelled by the possibilities of the role. “The contact with a version of your younger self, and as I discovered when I started playing it, the converse, the contact with the version of your older self, it’s intriguing, it’s scary,” he recalls. “I’ve heard people ask a lot of times, if you could go back to your younger self and give yourself some advice, what would it be? And Gemini Man actually creeps into that experience. It brings up existential questions about how to live a life.”
Henry Brogan is a complicated man. A steely killer with a conscience, he believes that those he is ordered to remove deserve their fate, but nonetheless absorbs the impact of taking their lives. Henry takes whatever peace he can find in his rustic rural Georgia home and enjoys sailing on the waterways in his tiny little boat, the Ella Mae. Despite his ruthless job, he is also fiercely loyal and protective to friends and associates who win his trust.
One person playing both roles gives you an opportunity to see to the core of the other characters in a way you generally don’t
The high-concept premise behind the film meant the technology had to catch up with the effects required to bring it to the big screen. Patience paid off, and Gemini Man boasts never-before-seen visual effects – supervised by Bill Westenhofer – designed to dramatically enhance the movie-going experience for audiences. As Smith remarks: “It’s really the first time that the vision of the film was technologically able to be realised.”
Delving deeper into Brogan’s character, Smith says: “Henry Brogan is a DIA agent who is essentially a spy hitman. He comes to the end of a long career, and he’s done a lot of things that he is not happy about, and he wants out. He retires from the agency, and they send someone to kill him. So in trying to figure out what’s going on and why they would send someone to kill him, Henry finds out that nearly 25 years ago, he was cloned, and they created an identical version of him that is just 23 years old, who they sent to kill him.
The actor admits that playing both roles allowed him to reflect on himself now, and on who he was as a younger man. “One of the emotional benefits is the connection to mistakes,” he says. “We all have fears, and it’s almost like when you speak to your child, that connective tissue has emotion in it of itself. So, I think that the one person playing both roles gives you an opportunity to see to the core of the other characters in a way you generally don’t.”
To understand both Henry and his junior version, Smith had to examine himself at both of the character’s ages. “I had to go back and look at old film and old tape of myself. There was almost an unrecognisable quality to my 23 or 24-year-old self when I went back. There was a freedom, and a recklessness to my early Fresh Prince, Bad Boys, Independence Day and Men in Black days. There was a creative recklessness that at 50 I admire, and that was one of the things I was trying to go back and recapture to get a sense of what were the thought patterns that led me to some of the behaviour that I had at that time. It was fun to explore and to seek.”
However, Smith also recognises that he “couldn’t have done it the other way. I couldn’t have, at 23 years old, played a 50-year-old version of my character with this technology. But this way, I was able to understand and capture both characters because of the amount of experience I’ve had as an actor.”
Joining Smith in Gemini Man’s ensemble are Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Clive Owen and Benedict Wong. The screenplay is written by David Benioff, Billy Ray and directed by Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee.