How Canadian Adrian Holmes reinvented Fresh Prince's Uncle Phil in gritty reboot

When he got the call to audition for Bel-Air, Adrian Holmes was worried. Even with three separate scenes to prepare for an adaptation premiering decades after an iconic original 1990s sitcom, he knew he didn't cut the typical Uncle Phil figure. 

In reality, the 47-year-old looked more like a football linebacker than the barrel-chested, strict-but-loving father figure of the original Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

And with his Welsh Canadian background, he seemed to share even less with the West Philadelphia — or even western L.A. — tale of a teen transported from one coast — and class — of the United States to its opposite. 

But, as Holmes said, that kind of turned out to be the point. 

"This is a modern day take on the show. The stakes are higher. It's a different world," he said in an interview with CBC.  "And so, you know, you have to have a little bit of an edge — I wanted him to be just a little more grounded and edgier."

Even in the few episodes streaming now on Showcase, it's not hard to tell that's what the show aims to be.

While The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air premiered in 1990 expressly to challenge preconceptions about what it means to be Black in the United State — a New York Times article at the time quoted star Will Smith as saying they were attempting to inject some realism and ''another view of the Black experience'' to the traditional sitcom formula — it was still, first and foremost a comedy.

Harsh storylines about police profiling, parental abandonment and the question of what it means to be Black at all were evened out with laughs and a happy ending.

And that caveat came alongside the fact that the studio and the show's creators pitched it as a vehicle to make rap and other elements of Black culture palatable to Americans, who were assumed to be unfamiliar — and uncomfortable — with them. 

For example: while that New York Times article had writer Susan Borowitz and creator Benny Medina reassuring the studio and journalists that "Will is not threatening," despite hanging a Malcolm X poster in the first episode, an Entertainment Weekly review tried to distil the wide-ranging influences and intents of the show as trying to "make rap safe for Middle America."

And after a Washington Post profile asked the question of why NBC would be "so delighted to have a six foot two inch, 21-year-old Black man in a backwards baseball cap running amok in their office," the writer of the article answered with a comforting realization: Smith was "the ideal guy to bring a whiff of rap to TV without offending anybody."

While Bel-Air does endeavour to pull plotlines straight from the original, Holmes views it as doing a lot more — or at least doing it differently.   

"We're not filling shoes, we're creating our own shoes," he said. "We're in a whole different place now, and it's a new generation and it's a new audience.

"We can take some of the topics and some of the subject matters from the original show, and we can stretch them out and peel back the layers of the onion."