The American Society of Magical Negroes star Justice Smith has been gracing our screens for over 10 years now.

While he is 27 years old, a lot of his most famous roles have painted him as a younger, inexperienced person. That is all about to change. While his character of Aren in the new film, The American Society of Magical Negroes, might display some inexperience in social settings; this is a widely new type of character for Smith.

There may be a lot of personal emotions behind Smith’s portrayal and performance. It doesn’t change the fact that we are getting some new sides of Justice Smith that prove once and for all that he is a formidable talent on the scene.

We spoke with the actor about the ease it is to inhabit a character that he can connect with, and all the small details that affect the viewers' take on the film as new information unfolds.

Justice Smith-American Society of Magical Negroes interview

Justice Smith and David Alan Grier.
A still from The American Society of Magical Negroes courtesy of Focus Features.

ClutchPoints: Now, I hope this doesn't come off sounding the wrong way, because I only mean it in the most positive manner. Because especially since you've been an adult for a very long time now, I feel like I just watched Justice Smith grow up watching this movie. Does that make any sense?

Justice Smith:  [laughs] Sure, yeah, I mean, in a way, yeah. I feel that. [smiles]

CP: Maybe to pinpoint something very specific, I'm going to skip right all the way to the end and talk about the outburst speech. Imagining the idea that there is such personal experience for yourself behind delivering those words, and even though they're Kobi's words, that there is a lot of your own feelings there as well. I don't want to make it sound like that makes it easier to deliver something like that, but is there a different kind of preparation process? 

JS: I mean, there's less preparation. I feel like that's the short answer, When all [that] is asked of me is to be honest to be truthful, that's a that's a lot easier to do than to bridge the gap between me and a character who I don't fully understand yet.

And that monologue is exactly the way I would have articulated it. It's something I'm very familiar with and I knew that all I had to do was learn the words and be present and that's what you see in the movie.

CP: Not trying to spoil things for people who haven't seen it yet, Aren is your performance and you have to worry about Aren compared to what other characters are doing throughout the movie in a certain sense. But what we learn later on at the end of the movie for another character, we'll keep it as vague as we can, does that also now kind of go into your mind for how I want to portray Aren? Because technically, the things we're seeing and the way he starts to free up on certain things, are coming actually from a different direction than we expected.

JS: Exactly. Yeah, the ending really reframes the whole movie and I hope that on the rewatch people will see how we planted a lot of those seeds early on.

You know, I don't want to give too much away either, but it's interesting to highlight the ways in which we are oblivious to how people are either making space for us or taking space away from us.

I think that's kind of a larger message of the film. It's like, Where do you fit in the environment at hand?

And yeah [chuckles], I think the ending contextualizes Aren in a completely different way.

CP: I think a lot of people before they see this movie are going to go in thinking that they know what they're seeing. And even though, again, there is that very pointed message that is overarching over all of this, it does kind of poke holes in the idea of, This is exactly what we all need to do. We all need to learn how to talk to each other in a different way the way the world's going right now.

JS: Exactly, yeah. I mean, ideally, the film starts conversation. I know that a lot of films want to start conversation. And, you know, funny enough, this film has already started a lot of conversation. [chuckles]

There's been a very interesting reaction that I am grateful for because I think that's what we set out to do.

The American Society of Magical Negroes is in theaters.