Believe it or not, it’s been a quarter of a century since Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones first partnered up to save our planet from the scum of the universe in Men in Black, with the classic blockbuster remaining every bit as entertaining and rewatchable now as it was back in the summer of 1997.
The sci-fi spectacular marked Smith’s third consecutive box office smash after 1995’s Bad Boys and the following year’s Independence Day, cementing his transition from sitcom favorite to A-list superstar. However, things could have been very different, with Batman Forever‘s Chris O’Donnell emerging as the studio’s top candidate to play Agent J.
Director Barry Sonnenfeld revealed in a retrospective interview with Insider that he deliberately under-sold the project to the actor, because Smith had always been his preferred choice to lead the project.
“I had suggested Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith. Will was actually my wife’s idea. I met with Chris and he had concerns about the script and had another movie offer. So I told him, ‘Yeah, we might never fix this script and I don’t think I know how to direct this movie.’ So he passed on the movie the next day. I think he’s a good actor, but I had really been thinking about Will since my wife made the suggestion.”
It wouldn’t be unfair to say the pair enjoyed very different career trajectories as the new millennium dawned, but it’s hard to gauge whether or not Men in Black would have been anywhere near the monster-sized hit that it was with O’Donnell opposite Jones’ grizzled Agent K, given that the chemistry between the pair we ended up with was nothing short of phenomenal.