Will Smith and Martin Lawrence are calling Bad Boys: Ride or Die a film that grabs you with the action, but has heavy, emotional weight.

“Underneath the jokes are some really powerful spiritual ideas,” said Smith to Blavity/Shadow and Act’s managing editor Trey Mangum. “To me that’s the fun of it…it’s a popcorn movie, but it’s gourmet popcorn.”

Both actors said that when they starred in the first film, they couldn’t imagine it turning into a four-film franchise.

“I never knew it would come to a fourth, especially when we were doing the first one,” said Lawrence.

“We didn’t know nothing,” Smith added. “It was all the way winging it on the first one.”

Smith also said that as the series has continued, the characters they play, Miami detectives Mike Lowrey (Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Lawrence) have been able to grow with them.

“I think one of the things that’s fun when you get to a four in a movie, your character starts to evolve with your actual life,” he said, referencing how the characters have become fathers and life experiences. “As you develop as a human and you come back to a character, your character begins to develop in similar ways. So those themes that you see in Bad Boys 4 are those things that Martin and I agreed with and wanted to explore on camera.”

Smith said that both he and Lawrence agreed after the second Bad Boys film that they didn’t want to make anymore sequels unless there was a real story to tell.

“We weren’t making any more unless the movie had a reason to go back into the world,” he said.

Watch the full interview above. Directed by Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, Bad Boys: Ride or Die is now in theaters.