I look like the crazy father, just like they said about Richard Williams. “I look like the crazy father, just like they said. “Art imitates life,” Smith said Sunday night. This is how “good violence” is differentiated from “bad violence.” We give them billy clubs and guns and stun guns and we tell them to exercise judgment in a country that is steeped in violence.Ĭops like to invoke a cliché about their jobs: They see themselves as sheepdogs, protecting unarmed civilians from wolves who would make a meal of them. Cops, after all, are people we entrust to be violent. Smith’s public persona, crafted over decades, has been one built on embracing the role of hero, protector and good cop. “That was the most disgusting display of ego I have ever seen in my life,” Smith recalls his wife telling him. When they got back to the hotel suite that night, Jada was nearly silent. Will had spent three years planning a private family-and-friends dinner in Santa Fe, where he screened a documentary he’d commissioned that chronicled her life and traced her family’s lineage back to slavery (and in which he tracked down a descendant of the white family who once owned Jada’s ancestors). Things reached a breaking point by Jada’s 40th birthday, in 2011. At one point, she turned down an opportunity for her band to open for Guns N’ Roses so that Smith could continue shooting The Pursuit of Happyness. Here’s a scene from Wesley Lowery’s 2021 GQ profile of Smith:Īs Smith’s stardom grew, his wife would wake up many mornings in tears. It’s uncomfortable and ethically dubious to drop too far down the pop psychology rabbit hole when evaluating these sorts of happenings.īut we do know a couple of things for sure, and one is that Pinkett Smith has bristled previously at a grand public gesture made by her husband, supposedly in her honor. It’s tempting to speculate that it’s because he’s never forgiven himself for witnessing his father abuse his mother as a child and not being able to defend her. Which brings us to Sunday night and to Smith making a mess of what was supposed to be his own crowning moment. West, in a spontaneous act of inebriated umbrage, was not only unfair to Swift, but also to Beyoncé, who then became responsible for cleaning up the mess that he made. It took years, a presidential pronouncement of jackassery and an oral history of the evening to come to a public consensus about the boneheadedness of West’s actions and how shabby they were. “One of the best videos of all time!” Related Story Can ‘Bad Boys’ become good men? Read now “Yo, Taylor, I’m really happy for you, I’ll let you finish, but Beyoncé has one of the best videos of all time,” West said as justification for rushing the stage in the middle of a live broadcast after Taylor Swift, and not Beyoncé, won the award for best female video. But it took me back to the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards when rapper Kanye West also tried to portray his actions as a form of gallantry in defending a wronged woman. To some, this was a display of chivalry, and Smith was to be commended. Smith responded with his five fingers making their way to Rock’s face. Rock had made an ill-advised joke about Pinkett Smith, who lives with alopecia, saying he was looking forward to G.I. “Keep my wife’s name out your f-ing mouth,” he thundered. Then he stomped back to his seat near the stage. In this business, you got to be able to have people disrespecting you, and you got to smile and pretend like that’s OK.” I know to do what we do, you got to be able to take abuse, you got to be able to have people talk crazy about you. “I’m being called on in my life to love people and to protect people and to be a river to my people.

I got to protect Saniyya and Demi, the two actresses that played Venus and Serena. “Making this film, I got to protect Aunjanue Ellis, who is one of the most strongest, most delicate people I’ve ever met.

“Richard Williams was a fierce defender of his family,” Smith said during his acceptance speech, invoking the tennis patriarch he won the Oscar for portraying. Most of it was an attempt to explain, apologize for, and to some degree excuse, his own violence. Sunday night, Smith gave a six-minute acceptance speech as he received the Academy Award for best actor in King Richard. A person can see himself, as Will Smith does, as a “protector” of other people and still be profoundly self-absorbed.

Slow motion will smith slap