Arguably no other moment at this year’s Oscars has caused as much excitement as this one. Will Smith storms onto the stage and slaps presenter Chris Rock after he made a joke about his wife Jada Pinkett Smith. Later that evening, the Hollywood star was still awarded Best Actor.
Since then, the incident has been widely discussed, especially on social media. Chris Rock himself had not commented on this for a long time. It was only during a live performance that he referred to the slap, just to signal that he did not want to comment further. However, he rejected a complaint against Smith on the evening of the award ceremony. He has since apologized publicly.
Rock and Smith were actually very good friends for a long time before that, which makes the actor’s outburst even more unusual. The two already stood together in front of the camera for the popular sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air” in the mid-1990s. In the sixth season of Smith’s breakthrough show, Rock guest-starred in a dual role as hit comedian Maurice Perry and his sister Jasmine.
Finding he has to take Jasmine out for the sake of his cousin, Smith is embarrassed to be seen in public with Rock’s “ugly” character and avoids the attention as best he can in a club. Here’s the performance again:
And Smith’s wife Jada has also been in front of the camera with the comedian. She appeared on Rock’s Show in 1997 to talk about the release of Scream 2, in which she starred. Rock jokingly didn’t mention Will Smith throughout the interview and presented her with a bottle of champagne at the end of the show. Eight years later, Rock and Pinkett Smith reunited as Marty the zebra and Gloria the hippo in the Dreamworks animated film Madagascar.
Some commenters had suspected there was an undisclosed altercation between Rock and Smith that fueled his response. In fact, Rock publicly poked fun at Jada Pinkett Smith back in 2016 when she campaigned for a boycott of the Oscars. Rock claimed at the time that she hadn’t been invited anyway.
Over a week later, Pinkett Smith responded to the joke with a somewhat cryptic statement at the time: “It comes with the territory, we gotta keep it moving… We’ve got a lot of things to deal with, a lot of things that are going on right now.” happen in our world. We have to keep it moving,” the actress said at the time.