How a Tube driver travelled the world as Will Smith’s double

Walking along a remote beach in Papua New Guinea, Shad Ellis found himself having a heart-to-heart with Will Smith, one of the most recognisable faces on the planet.

The twist? The face the London tube driver’s gaze alighted on looked uncannily like his own.

The 47-year-old has made a career out of being a Will Smith lookalike and tribute artist since he was 18.

But after three decades of “getting jiggy with it” for fans across the globe, he was finally telling the Hollywood star how much that resemblance had changed his life.

Although he now lives in Bedford, Ellis was born and raised in the capital.

While the Fresh Prince famously began his story on a playground in West Philadelphia, Ellis’s unfolded deep within the Underground in east London.

It was 1997 and posters for Men In Black were plastered across the tube network.

At Shadwell, the resemblance between the Hollywood star on the walls and the then station assistant behind the barrier was impossible for commuters to ignore.

“I had regular customers coming through the station saying ‘oh my god, you look like Will Smith’,” Shad recalls.

“They’d call me ‘Will’ jokingly and I thought nothing of it. OK, there’s a little similarity, that’s all it is.”

One day a stranger approached him with a life-changing tip — he had a friend making money as a lookalike and Ellis should give it a go.

As this was pre-social media and selfie sticks, Ellis had to take photos of himself with a film camera as he recreated Will’s magazine poses.

He sent those to an agency he found in a newspaper and two weeks later they wrote to him saying he had the right look, but they warned that only royal family lookalikes make any real money.

“Within a week I had my first job which was the front cover of an electrical magazine as they were kind of re-enacting the Men in Black posters except we were holding these electronic wind-up torches.

“From there I started meeting people, networking, then I’d have jobs and I’d meet more people and it just grew.”

At a karaoke night, some years later, Ellis’s friends convinced him to perform the star’s 90s hit single Miami. They liked it so much they made him do it three times.

After that his agent started booking him tribute artist slots at clubs like Jumping Jacks and Envy across the country.

He said: “I do anything that you want Will Smith to do that you couldn’t afford to get Will Smith to do.

“So I do a lot of corporate events, end-of-year work parties, weddings, private birthday functions, bar mitzvahs.”

He also does magazine covers and global marketing campaigns that fly him everywhere from Dubai to Singapore.

Occasionally offers come in that Shad is not comfortable with, such as events pretending it’s the real Will Smith, stunts designed to make a joke out of the actor and occasionally adult films.

“I turn down so much work because I’m quite protective of him and his brand, they have to kind of respect the boundaries and stuff,” he insists.

After the actor infamously slapped Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars, Ellis was inundated with offers which he turned down.

He refused to be “the guy that’s been cashing in” as he felt that one day he would have to look the star in the face.

Also in 2022, the doppelganger’s life was turned upside down.

He was hired to be a body double for Pole To Pole, a National Geographic series where Will Smith journeys across seven continent in 100 days.

Ellis was flown to locations like Botswana, Norway and Papua New Guinea so crews could prepare shots and lighting before Smith’s arrival, to make the best use of the actor’s time.

Occasionally he was used in place of the busy star for aerial shots where you cannot clearly see his face.

Eventually both men crossed paths on set and the lookalike was embraced with a handshake and a shoulder bump.

They ran into each other a few times during filming and Ellis described Smith as “very humble and very appreciative” of the work he was doing.

The star would often offer a “good job” or an “I appreciate you man”, at one point he took the time to wish Ellis a happy birthday on set.

After befriending one of Smith’s managers Ellis made a request: “Can you get me five minutes with Will, but just me and him? I don’t want the cameras.”

Then on the last day of shooting in Papua New Guinea the tube driver and the movie star took a walk along a remote beach.

He was not trying to become “best friends” with the actor, he just wanted to use that time to express a gratitude decades in the making.

He told Smith: “I just want to say how thankful I am and how grateful I am to you just for being you, because you’ve enabled me — a person that you had no idea probably exists — to do some amazing things.”

The Bad Boys actor responded with joy, describing the lookalike’s work as “genius” and embracing him in a hug.

When Ellis mentioned he performs as a tribute artist the star joked: “Shad, imagine you were doing a show and I came out! We would shut down the internet.”

Despite his glamorous brush with fame, Ellis has not given up the day job, he is still in the driver’s seat on a London Underground train.

The memory of shooting Pole to Pole is still fresh in his mind: “The sun was beating down, it was hot and I’m sitting there thinking ‘this is boring as hell’ but then ‘yeah, but you could be driving a train’.”

After running into the actor again this week at a crew screening of the series, Ellis is hoping to work with him again in the future, keeping in touch with the production teams he met overseas.

He says: “Every year I wake up and I’m like, am I going to keep going with this?

“Then it’s like, you know what? I’m going to keep doing this until I don’t look like him or all my hair falls out.”