Will Smith is opening up about a terrifying moment that nearly turned deadly while filming his new Disney+ travel series, Pole to Pole With Will Smith.
Appearing on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Smith recalled a scuba dive beneath thick ice at the North Pole that quickly went wrong. “You go under the ice, and it can be up to 10 feet thick,” he explained. “We’re about 40 yards out and I hear, ‘Abort dive! Abort!’”
When Smith tried to surface, he hit solid ice. “I was like, ‘Oh no, Will, calm down,’” he said. As he grabbed his tether to pull himself back to the entry hole, he accidentally knocked his mask off. The actor joked that the scare sparked an instant vow. “If I get out of here, I’m only gonna do Black stuff from here on out,” he laughed.
Another crew member helped guide him back, and the panic soon shifted into awe. “The sun was coming through the ice,” Smith said. “It went from terror to the most spiritual, beautiful thing.”
The series also pushed Smith far outside his comfort zone in the Amazon, where he joined an Indigenous group tracking an anaconda for conservation research. “They jumped right in the water,” he said. “I don’t know why they needed me.”
Watch him explain in the clip above.