A shadow has hung over Will Smith’s career since the 2022 Oscars. The reason for this is the slap he gave presenter Chris Rock just before he was presented with a gold boy himself. A year after the incident, the Hollywood star is back to joking.
With his attack on the US comedian Chris Rock, who joked about his wife, Will Smith destroyed within a few seconds at the 2022 Oscars what he had painstakingly built up for years: his career. Minutes before he himself was being recognized for his performance in “King Richard,” he stormed onto the stage and gave Rock a resounding slap in the face. Smith was allowed to keep the coveted golden boy in the end, but he was banned from the Oscar Academy for the next ten years.
After apologizing for his behavior several times in the past year and withdrawing from public and social media for a long time, Smith is apparently slowly taking the incident with humor. At least one Tiktok video that the actor is now sharing with his fans is evidence of this. In it, the 54-year-old can be seen in split-screen next to a Tiktok user, whom he listens intently to as she talks about how inanimate objects can express what they think about their owner.
“Did you know you can select any item, look at it and ask what it thinks of you?” asks the woman, who can be found on the platform at @missmoneyworking. “So you can, for example, take a pen and ask him how he sees you or what he thinks of you and you will get an answer from your intuition in your heads.”
A few seconds later only Will Smith can be seen in full screen mode. As an answer to the young woman, he brings the same Oscar into the picture from the off and looks at him intensely. He exhales heavily, opens his mouth – and just at the moment when it looks like he wants to say something to his Oscar, the video breaks off. What the golden boy thinks of his owner provides a lot of material for speculation due to the abrupt end, but remains a secret forever.
Will Smith himself resigned from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences after the Oscars. He then accepted “all further consequences,” he wrote in a statement. His behavior was “shocking, painful and inexcusable”. He later issued multiple public apologies to Chris Rock. He spent a lot of time “replaying and understanding the nuances and complexities of what happened in that moment,” Smith said in a Facebook video. No part of him believes he did the right thing. He deeply regrets it and tries to work through what happened without being ashamed of himself.
