State’s viral film parody star meets Will Smith
Maddie Presser, 4, featured in actor’s ‘Will at Home’ show
Southington preschooler Maddie Presser’s whirlwind online film career hit a new level this winter when she co-starred with Will Smith in a virtual remake of an action scene from “Independence Day.”
Presser and her family appeared in a new episode of Smith’s SnapChat series “Will at Home,” which celebrates people who do good in their communities. Their “Independence Day” collaboration was posted online Wednesday.
Maddie has gained international fame for her forthright renditions of scenes from Hollywoodclassics. She’s tackled roles in everything from “Thelma and Louise” and “Braveheart” to “Mrs. Doubtfire” and “A Few Good Men.” The videos are posted on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
Maddie’s dad and director Dan Presser, a producer for ESPN’s ACC Network, conceived of the homemade video series as a way to amuse the family during the COVID shutdown. It was decided to use the series to raise money for charity, and Maddie helped pick Feeding America from a list of organizations for which ESPN offers matching donations to employees.
“I got contacted in December,” Presser says. “They said it was Westbrook, Inc., so I looked it up and found that it was a company owned by Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith. But we didn’t know what it was about. I told my wife, ‘This is either going to be the coolest interview or the worst.
“Then, there was Will Smith, on the call. He was very complimentary about what we were doing. He said he wanted to be in a movie with Maddie.” As seen in the Snapchat show, Smith repeats the request —“I want to be in one of your productions” — then stands in front of a green screen and said iconic lines from some of his movies so they could be spliced together in a scene with Maddie. Besides “Independence Day,” Smith is shown in “Will at Home” sharing lines from “Men in Black” and “The Pursuit of Happyness.”
On the show, Smith also arranges for DJ Khaled to present Maddie with an award for “Best Actress in a Family Home Movie.” One of the Pressers’ earlier videos imagined Maddie at a TV awards ceremony, clutching one of her father’s own Emmys.
Presser says that when he was in his early teens, there was no bigger star in the world for someone that age than Will Smith. He’s seen every episode of “Fresh Prince of Bel Air” and also loves many of Smith’s movies. “I don’t really get starstruck, but he was such a big deal to me.”
In “Will at Home,” Smith jokes that “There just wasn’t a lot of Will Smith movies in your filmography there.” Dan Presser explains that with Maddie’s brother Barton, now 2, barely able to talk let alone learn lines, his resources are limited.
When the Courant last wrote about Maddie Presser in September, her videos had raised $26,000 for Feeding America. That included a previous celebrity donation, from motivational speaker Tony
Robbins. The amount has now more than doubled to $55,000, largely due to two donations presented by Smith on the Snapchat show: $10,000 from the photography site Shutterstock and a combined $5,000 from the children’s clothing chains Janie and Jack and Banana Republic.
There was one last surprise: an all-expenses-paid vacation for four to Jamaica, provided by Beaches Resort, as a reward for their charitable work. The family hopes to take the trip later this year.
Production on the videos has slowed down a bit now that Maddie goes to preschool twice a week and Dan Presser has a more active work schedule. Also, the list of iconic films that a child can appear in is dwindling. But a clever take on “Varsity Blues” (Dan Presser is partial to sports films) was recently concocted, as was a holiday treat, “Elf,” and now the most star-studded Presser production to date, “Independence Day.”
Now that she’s an old hand at filmmaking, Maddie is taking a stronger role behind the camera. “She brainstorms with us now,” her father says. “We’re doing ‘The Shawshank Redemption,’ and she helped figure out what we could use for the tunnel: the one at Camp Sloper in Southington.” Frequent co-star Barton is also growing into bigger roles. “He’s kind of talking, and he has hair,” Presser said. A “Groundhog Day” parody is in the works, which Presser feels has a nice resonance in the COVID age of “wanting things to be different.
“Hey,” he muses. “We should reach out to Bill Murray, now that we’ve gotten Will Smith!”