Will Smith has slowly inched back towards public life over recent months following The Slap That Shook The World: first came a carefully pruned and choreographed apology by way of YouTube video, then a series of low-key interview segments addressing his post-Oscars reclusiveness (in about ways). With an awards campaign for Apple TV+'s Smith-starring drama Emancipation kicking into gear ahead of its release in December, the Will Smith redemption tour has continued apace, this time marked by a candid conversation about the fallout on Trevor Noah's Daily Show.
There was the obligatory reference to Smith's public absence, of course. “I have been away,” he said, the crowd laughing in response. “What have y'all be doing?”
He then recalled the night in question, calling it “horrific … as you can imagine," continuing that “there's many nuances and complexities to it. But at the end of the day, I just — I lost it, you know? I was going through something that night, you know? Not that that justifies my behaviour at all… it was a lot of things. It was the little boy that watched his father beat up his mother, you know? All of that just bubbled up in that moment. That is not who I want to be.”
Noah, a friend of Smith's, noted that the 54-year-old talks about his fear of conflict in his recent autobiography, where he details the violence against his mother at the hands of his father when he was young. “Some people were overreacting, which made some people underreact,” observed Noah of the incident at the Dolby Theatre.
“I was gone. That was a rage that had been bottled for a really long time,” Smith said. “My nephew is nine. He is the sweetest little boy. We came home. He had stayed up late to see his uncle Will and we are sitting in my kitchen and he is on my lap and he is holding the Oscar and he is just like, ‘Why did you hit that man, Uncle Will?' Damn it. Why are you trying to Oprah me?”
Speaking in another interview on television network Fox 5, the actor acknowledged that audiences might not be rushing to see him on the big screen so soon. “I completely understand that, if someone is not ready,” he said. “I would absolutely respect that and allow them their space to not be ready.”
Now that Smith has gone through the night of the incident at great length, all that remains to be seen is who will play him in the inevitable slap biopic.
