Will Smith has claimed Rihanna had a positive reaction after watching his new film Emancipation.
The Fenty Beauty founder attended a special screening of the film last month along with A$AP Rocky, Tyler Perry, Dave Chappelle, and other celebrities.
Smith told E! News that Rihanna “loved the cinematography” of the film.
“She could not get over the look of the film and how it felt,” he said.
“The thing that’s great with Black people is they talk to the screen the whole time, so you don’t have to ask people’s opinion,” Smith joked. “So, I didn’t have to ask anybody’s opinion from the room.”
Emancipation follows the story of Peter (Smith), a slave, who flees a plantation in Louisiana after receiving a brutal whipping.
He then has to outwit cold-blooded hunters and the unforgiving swamps of Louisiana on a torturous journey north.
This film will mark the first Smith project to be released after the actor struck presenter Chris Rock in the face on stage for a joke made about his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.
During the new movie’s red carpet premiere on Wednesday (30 November), Smith spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about what he envisioned of the movie, singling out the “potential service it could have to modern social conversation”.
“I thought it would be a necessary reminder of some of the roads we have gone down as a country in the past, to potentially avert any of those similar paths,” he said.
“To have a movie like this in this time for me, and even this time in my life is poetic perfection.”
Read The Independent’s two-star review of the film here.
Emancipation will premiere on Apple TV+ on 9 December.
