By Travis M Andrews
For anyone who hasn’t turned on a television (or a computer, or a phone) since Monday morning, a quick recap: Chris Rock was onstage at the Oscars, preparing to present the best-documentary award.
He joked that he was looking forward to seeing Jada Pinkett Smith – Will Smith’s wife, who openly suffers from alopecia – in G.I. Jane 2, seeming to reference Pinkett Smith's bald head.
Will Smith climbed onstage, steadily walked toward Rock and slapped him across the face. He returned to his seat and twice screamed“ ”Keep my wife’s name out your f---ing mouth!“
Later in the ceremony, he won the best-actor Oscar he has chased for two decades.
It was an unthinkable hour for one of the world’s biggest celebrities. The man who Eminem once joked “don’t gotta cuss in his raps to sell records” smacked a comedian during the biggest night of the year for his industry and sobbed on the Dolby Theatre stage as he accepted his own accolade for King Richard.
If you haven’t paid attention to Smith recently, you’d be forgiven for finding his tears shocking. This, after all, is a celebrity who built his brand on being a smooth, unflappable character who rarely loses his cool. That image is what lent so much gravitas to the famous “hug” scene in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, in which his character finally breaks down crying.
But that’s not who he is anymore. Who is he?
Smith, 53, seems to have embraced this chance to err toward sharing in recent years, publicly touting his every thought and feeling with an audience that once loved him precisely because he did the opposite. He embodies a singular type of public figure: an old-school movie star who embraces radical honesty and seems to be on a quest to exorcise his demons in public.
It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when the shift began, but there’s no question it's been a conscious decision.
As Smith tells it, he hit a “mid-life crisis point” in 2012, a year he refers to as “the year of the mutiny”.
It “was really the year that my family rejected the direction of my leadership”, Smith told Haute Living, explaining that while his family was successful, it wasn’t happy. He wanted to change and grow as a person, a husband and a father – not merely as an entertainer.
He made it his mission to enrich himself emotionally, mentally and spiritually. He took part in more than a dozen ayahuasca rituals in Peru. He reflected for weeks in solitude. He spent years working with Michaela Boehm, an intimacy coach. He began reading books by self-described “spiritual teacher” David Deida, including The Way of the Superior Man.
Meanwhile, he doggedly embraced social media, where he began posting everything from professional anecdotes to his attempt to lose weight. That intimate look into his life picked up speed in 2018 with the launch of Red Table Talk, a talk show on Facebook Watch in which Pinkett Smith, along with her mother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris, and daughter, Willow, have intimate conversations about their family, often inviting guests (such as Smith himself) onto the show.
In the most well-known (and widely meme-d) episode, Pinkett Smith and Smith discussed their relationship, which many have deemed as monogamish. “We broke up within our marriage and got back together again,” Smith said, “and had to rebuild with new rules and something way, completely different”.
This unabashed earnestness found its way into his projects. While he tackles blockbuster fare, they fail more often than they succeed, critically and commercially. Perhaps as a result, he has begun investing more time in his passion projects.
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, he got Emancipation, his first movie about slavery, green-lit. And in 2019, a mock trailer by Morgan Cooper re-imagining The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air sitcom as a serious drama caught Smith's eye. Now, it’s a show, titled Bel-Air, streaming soon on Showmax, with Smith as an executive producer.
And, of course, there's King Richard. Smith connected deeply with the story of Richard Williams, father and coach to Venus and Serena. Calling the story “just uniquely timed in my life.”
Also uniquely timed: Smith's release of his memoir, Will, which came out on November 9 – 10 days before King Richard debuted.
“I’ve spent my whole career hiding my true self from the world,” Smith told Mark Manson, who helped write the book. The memoir proved to be yet another example of the openness that fits a larger and more recent desire from the actor: his self-proclaimed calling to protect those around him – and not just his own family.
“That's what my life is for,” Smith said, adding, “That's when I want to be there. If everything is great, call somebody else. Call me when you need help. I love it. I love being the 2am emergency phone call.”
That vocation to protect may have an origin story. For all his openness, one passage from his memoir may shed an uncomfortable amount of light on what happened on Sunday night. Smith writes about his father's alcoholism and violent tendencies, focusing on a particularly awful experience that, he wrote, “defined who I am”: “When I was nine years old, I watched my father punch my mother in the side of the head so hard that she collapsed. I saw her spit blood.”
When his father was suffering from cancer years later, he wrote that he was pushing him in his wheelchair from the bedroom to the bathroom, a path that crossed the top of a staircase. He entertained the thought of throwing him down the stairs, of killing him.
“Within everything that I have done since then – the awards and accolades, the spotlights and attention, the characters and the laughs - there has been a subtle string of apologies to my mother for my inaction that day. For failing her in the moment. For failing to stand up to my father. For being a coward,” he wrote.
“What you have come to understand as ’Will Smith’, the alien-annihilating MC, the bigger-than-life movie star, is largely a construction – a carefully crafted and honed character – designed to protect myself. To hide myself from the world. To hide the coward.”
In his speech, he repeatedly suggested that he’s needed to “protect” those he loved: “Richard Williams was a fierce defender of his family,” he said. “I'm being called on in my life to love people and to protect people and to be a river to my people.”
But, as the academy opens a “formal review” of his actions, Smith may learn that the person he most needs to protect is himself.
This article first appeared in Saturday Insider, April 2, 2022