Will Smith‘s role in Concussion looks powerful, to say the least. The trailer for the film dropped today, giving us a first look at Smith playing a Nigerian doctor who discovered a link between excessive head trauma and mental illness in NFL players.
Smith portrays forensic pathologist and neuropathologist, Dr. Bennet Omalu, who discovered what is now known as Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy.
Concussion, which drops Christmas Day, is based off an explosive 2009 GQ article, Game Brain: Football Players and Concussions, detailing Omalu CTE discovery, and how the NFL financially abandoned former players who filed for disability payments, brought on by playing in the NFL.
Omalu found the link between the players and mental illness, after performing an autopsy on Mike Webster formerly of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Webster died from a heart attack in 2002. But how did he go from a Super Bowl champ to battling dementia, and depression?
Through autopsies of roughly a dozen deceased NFL players, Omalu found CTE to be a recurring theme. Smith portrays Omalu’s fight to get the NFL to acknowledge how players are at risk for brain trauma, which ultimately made him a target of one of the biggest corporations in the world.
The trail looks pretty intense. Peep it below.
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Photo: screenshot
