Actor Will Smith has been chased by Aliens and attacked by Zombies in his films, but those imaginary threats are nothing compared to a big cat. The 48-year-old actor says a surveillance footage showed a lion prowling the backyard of his home.
During an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, the Collateral Beauty actor insisted that the big cat caught in his security footage was an actual African Lion, not a mountain lion as the Oscar host thought.
Smith said: "That's a Lion Ellen. You see one of them jokers in Kenya. That's 25 yards from my bed."
The Independence Day star added that once he saw the footage he treated it like an emergency situation. He said: "You immediately put the kids on punishment, you call the ranger, and the ranger comes out and says you have a lion."
Smith says he was told that these incidents happen because it was a conservation area. The only way to ensure that lions don't stray near his house in the future was to buy lion urine, priced at around $38.99 a gallon.
"I can see why it would be expensive, because someone has to get it. They do a circle of the lion urine around your house and apparently that keeps other lions away," Smith said.
However, finding Ellen still sceptical about the whole lion story, Smith now drew reference to Disney's The Lion King. In the film directed by Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, Mufasa, the fierce-but-just lion ruler, Simba's father, was voiced by James Earl Jones.
The mountain lion, which in another footage looked quite small and tamed, as it had a collar on. Ellen explained that there are people who keep exotic pets and then abandon them when they grow in size. Such a thing could surely have happened to this poor beast that has no idea what to do, in a hostile neighbourhood.
Smith wasn't satisfied with the lion urine and said the ranger should have been able to capture and relocate the animal somewhere safe, maybe to Oscar winner Denzel Washington's house. He joked: "I thought he should have at least been able to relocate it to Denzel's house."
