The 94th Academy Awards will surely go down as one of the most memorable nights in Will Smith’s career - but not in the way we’d expected.
For months, Smith had been the frontrunner in this year’s Best Actor race for his turn as Richard Williams, the father of tennis superstars Serena and Venus, in King Richard.
Smith had previously received Oscar nominations for Ali in 2002 and The Pursuit of Happyness in 2007, and after a clean sweep of the awards circuit this year, receiving a Bafta, a Golden Globe and a SAG trophy, it looked like it would be a case of third time lucky for the 53-year-old.
But when his big win was announced on Sunday night (or in the early hours of Monday morning for viewers on this side of the Atlantic), it was somewhat overshadowed by what had happened about half an hour before.
After Chris Rock made a joke about Smith’s wife Jada Pinkett Smith, describing her shaved head as “ready for GI Jane 2” (Pinkett Smith has alopecia, which causes hair loss), the actor walked onto the stage of the Dolby theatre and slapped the comedian. “Take my wife’s name out of your f**king mouth,” he shouted at Rock twice.
When he took to the stage again to receive his trophy, a tearful Smith apologised to the Academy and his fellow nominees. “Love will make you do crazy things”, he said in a speech in which he framed himself and Williams as protectors, referring to the character he played as “a fierce defender of his family”.
The incident, one of the most shocking in Academy Awards history, inevitably overshadowed the whole night, as winners clutching their trophies were asked to comment on Smith’s behaviour in the backstage press room, dampening their moment in the spotlight.
Smith’s violent outburst was condemned by the Academy in a statement released afterwards and by figures ranging from Hollywood stars (Mia Farrow) to literary luminaries (Bernadine Evaristo); others noted that Rock’s personal jibe went too far. US congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, who also suffers from alopecia, tweeted, then deleted, a message thanking Smith and “all the husbands who defend their wives living with alopecia in the face of daily ignorance and insults.”
In the aftermath of the ceremony, it’s been pointed out that Smith’s family history could shed some light on the way he reacted to Rock’s words.
Writing in his 2021 autobiography, the actor explained how, aged nine, he witnessed his father assaulting his mother - and that since then, he has struggled to forgive himself for “failing to stand up to my father”, and has been constantly apologising to his mother for his “inaction”.
“When I was nine years old, I watched my father punch my mother in the side of the head so hard that he collapsed,” Smith wrote. “I saw her spit blood. That moment in that bedroom, probably more than any other moment in my life, has defined who I am.”
“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”.
His public persona, he added, “the alien-annihilating MC, the bigger-than-life movie star, is largely a construction - a carefully crafted and honed character designed to protect myself” and “hide the coward”.
Smith’s parents eventually separated when he was 13, though they did not formally divorce until 2000. In his late teens, Smith got his first taste of stardom as one half of hip-hop duo DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, along with his childhood friend Jeffrey Townes. The pair would go on to earn two Grammys for Best Rap Performance for their efforts - but how did Smith make the leap from rapper to box office magnet?
After failing to correctly pay income tax in the late Eighties, Smith was struggling with debt despite his music successes. Around the same time, music manager Benny Medina pitched the idea for a sitcom loosely based on his younger years, where a young black teenager would move in with a wealthy family (Medina himself had gone to live with a white family, but he decided to feature a rich black family instead), to producer Quincy Jones. Meeting Smith by chance at another sitcom taping, Medina invited him to a party at Jones’ house, where he eventually did an on-the-spot audition in front of the head of NBC.
Clearly it was a success - his first contract for the show that would become The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was drawn up in a limo outside the party. It would go on to run for six seasons - and would introduce him to his future wife Pinkett Smith, who auditioned to play his girlfriend (she was deemed too short for the role). The role made Smith a huge star, allowing him to jump to high-profile roles in films like Bad Boys, Independence Day and Men in Black, all of which were major box office successes. Recording the theme tune for the latter also kicked off Smith’s solo music career; his debut album Big Willie Style was later certified platinum. Nine times.
Smith, at this point, was clearly in his imperial phase, earning his first Oscar nomination for Ali and establishing himself as a major box office draw and fully fledged movie star. Even his critically derided projects - like 1999’s Wild Wild West, a steampunk fantasy set during the American Civil War - could often still turn over hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office.
His success wasn’t an accident, it was down to careful strategising: he has always been open about his methodical approach to stardom, revealing to the Hollywood Reporter in 2015 how he and his manager sat down and analysed the top 10 movies of all time. “What we found is at the centre, there were always special effects… there [were] always creatures, there was always a love story. So we started looking for movies that had special effects, creatures and a love story.” He still holds the record for the most consecutive films to gross $100 million and upwards at the US box office (it’s eight, a run which takes us from 2002’s Men in Black 2 to 2008’s Hancock).
That formula started to flounder in the 2010s, though, when Smith notched up a string of disappointments like apocalyptic sci-fi After Earth, which he starred in alongside son Jaden (who made his debut alongside his father in 2006’s The Pursuit of Happyness), Collateral Beauty and Concussion. Other films - like Suicide Squad, Netflix movie Bright and the live action re-make of Aladdin - proved lucrative for Smith but didn’t summon up much enthusiasm from critics.
Released last year, King Richard felt like a return to form for Smith - though it arrived in cinemas right in the middle of the promotional trail for the star’s no-holds-barred autobiography, Will. In the book, he opens up about his 25 year marriage to Pinkett Smith, detailing the difficulties they have faced as a couple and how they briefly split up around her 40th birthday, after he threw a surprise birthday party which included a performance from Mary J. Blige and a documentary that traced his wife’s family history back to slavery (she described it, he said, as “the most disgusting display of ego I have ever seen in my life”).
“We agreed that she had to make herself happy and I had to make myself happy,” he wrote. “Then we were going to present ourselves back to the relationship already happy - versus demanding that the other person fill our empty cup.”
Discussing the memoir further with GQ, Smith said that the couple now give “each other trust and freedom, with the belief that everybody has to find their own way” and that they no longer see marriage as a “prison.”
His comments came after the couple publicly discussed extra-marital romances on an episode of Pinkett Smith’s talk show Red Table Talk, which also features her mother Adrienne Banfield-Norris and the couple’s daughter Willow, when they spoke about her “entanglement” with musician August Alsina, which she later clarified was a “relationship”.
Their candour has certainly made their relationship a go-to punchline in recent years. While hosting the Baftas, Rebel Wilson joked that: “Will Smith won for King Richard, but I thought his best performance over the past year was being OK with all his wife’s boyfriends.” Earlier on during Oscar night, host Regina Hall namechecked Smith during a sketch in which she joked about rounding up a number of Hollywood actors for Covid testing. “Will Smith... you’re married but you know what, you’re on the list and it looks like Jada approved you so get on up here,” she said.
Rock’s jibe may not have taken aim at the couple’s marriage, but it wasn’t the first time that he had targeted Pinkett Smith during the Oscars telecast. In 2016, the comedian drew attention to her boycott of the ceremony in the wake of the #OscarsSoWhite outcry (a response to the Academy nominating white performers only, for the second year running), telling the audience: “Jada boycotting the Oscars is like me boycotting Rihanna’s panties. I wasn’t invited.”
In his winner’s speech, Smith acknowledged that being in the public eye requires a certain thickness of skin. “I know that to do what we do, you gotta be able to take abuse, you gotta be able to have people talk crazy about you... you gotta be able to have people disrespecting you and you gotta smile and you gotta pretend like that’s OK”. Indeed, his star persona has always been one of total affability - the funny and charming Hollywood good guy. Will this Oscar night altercation throw Smith’s comeback off track? Who knows - though Hollywood has certainly forgiven, or conveniently forgotten about, worse.
