“My dad was and still is way before his time,” Serena Williams told me in an email. Smith plays him as a crotchety, unbending, but fiercely loving parent. The irascible Williams trained both daughters with balls collected from the tennis clubs he couldn’t get into, and protected them from the grind of tennis and the media in a way that makes him look like a prophet of the current moment in which athletes like Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles prioritize their agency and mental health. In the grand Smith tradition, it’s an inspiring story of triumph over adversity that contains an affecting character study. That means making movies like King Richard, directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green and due in theaters this November, in which Smith portrays Richard Williams, the eccentric, hard-nosed father of Venus and Serena.
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