Riding and Dying With Will Smith
Two years after the “Slap,” Will Smith gets back to the basics, which could mean business as usual for him (and Hollywood)
Two years have passed since Will Smith slapped Chris Rock onstage at the 94th Academy Awards, and it remains surreal how swiftly and awkwardly the incident, instantly branded “the Slap,” unfolded. I didn’t see it happen live, so imagine my shock when I awoke on the evening of March 27, 2022, to dozens of texts alerting me of the following: After Rock made a joke about the hair of Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith (she’d been open about her struggles with alopecia), Smith marched onstage and smacked Rock in the face before returning to his seat and saying—then bellowing—“Keep my wife’s name out your fucking mouth!” Later in the evening, the air in Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre still thick with unease, an emotional Smith returned to the stage to accept the Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role, claiming the award for his portrayal of Venus and Serena Williams’s father, the dauntless Richard Williams, in King Richard.
Smith—as strategic as he is charismatic, especially regarding his career—had sought this moment of validation for so long, only for it to be bound to the moment when he lost the cool that helped make him one of the biggest stars in the world. The Slap wasn’t a referendum on Smith or his career, but someone as image conscious as he is didn’t need a crystal ball or a crisis management firm to let him know what was coming his way.
As anticipated, the online discourse machine instantly devoured the Slap, to frustrating ends. It was a reminder that multiple things can be true at once (Rock crossed a line; Smith thoroughly embarrassed himself in his attempt to be gallant; some reactions to it were simply unhinged), a nuanced scenario dissected on platforms with no place for nuance. Instead, it became fodder for shameless engagement, corny jokes, disingenuous grandstanding, and insufferably self-righteous behavior. It became a Rorschach test revealing where people stand on the matter of physical confrontation, with close observers on both sides making note of who shared their perspectives and who, disappointingly or irritatingly, did not. It was also an example of how quickly some people invoke the law—using the term “assault,” suggesting Smith should’ve been arrested—when they feel uncomfortable. But before the Slap, it would have been difficult to imagine feeling uncomfortable in Will Smith’s presence.
Smith has spent nearly four decades going out of his way to present himself as nonthreatening for the sake of his upward mobility. “I’m trying to create a joyful persona, and it’s because a long time ago I realized how you enter a space is going to determine how the space reacts to you,” he told The New York Times Magazine in 2021, describing what his walk says about him. “I want to walk into a room and get as many friends as quickly as possible.” Despite Smith’s extremely lucrative method of winning friends and influencing people, he became radioactive almost overnight. After resigning from the Academy the following week, Smith was banned from attending the Oscars for 10 years. He apologized to Rock in a nearly six-minute video, but the latter wasn’t receptive and later targeted the Smiths in his 2023 Netflix comedy special Selective Outrage. Emancipation, Smith’s first post-Slap film, was released in December 2022 after a slight delay. Its press run was essentially an apology tour in which Smith prostrated himself for forgiveness, and the film received a lukewarm reception. Other projects were put on hold, but development for the fourth Bad Boys film, which was announced before Bad Boys for Life became one of the highest-grossing films of 2020, was always a matter of “when” rather than “if.”
Smith, one of the definitive celebrities of the past half century, has been very good at being famous for a very long time. It’s a privilege and an intangible that can manifest as laying low, then materializing at the most opportune moments. Coachella fixture Vanessa Hudgens, a Bad Boys for Life and Bad Boys: Ride or Die costar, was absent from this year’s festival, but Smith made a surprise appearance during J Balvin’s set, performing the “Men in Black” theme in full Agent J costume. Cynicism aside, reemerging as a popular character from a highly successful franchise is a canny move. With Bad Boys: Ride or Die releasing this Friday, Smith is also sliding back into the role of Mike Lowrey, his breakthrough character from another highly successful franchise. Recently, Smith and Martin Lawrence appeared in character alongside Miami Heat star Jimmy Butler in cross-promotional ads for Bad Boys: Ride or Die and the NBA Finals. Smith performed “Miami” on top of a double-decker bus at the Bad Boys: Ride or Die Los Angeles premiere last week, and he sat across from Sean Evans on Hot Ones this week as part of his ongoing press commitments. This type of maneuvering was almost certainly always the plan, but it’s intriguing for reasons beyond what I’m reluctant to call Smith’s “comeback.”
If anything, seeing Smith slip back into the character of Lowrey (and that Porsche 911 that’s become an extension of the performance) is fascinating because he and this particular character have always been in direct conversation with each other.
At various points in Dan Charnas’s exhaustive music biz tome The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop, stories are told about different executives who identified a DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince–era Smith as a potential movie star. “I think Will Smith can be as big as Eddie Murphy,” music exec and eventual film producer Ann Carli told a skeptical Russell Simmons, Smith’s manager at the time, in 1988. Two years later, John Landis, who’d directed Murphy in 1983’s Trading Places and 1988’s Coming to America, echoed the same praise to Disney lawyer Ken Hertz with certainty: “He’s going to be the next Eddie Murphy.” While 1996’s Independence Day put Smith on the trajectory to superstardom, 1995’s Bad Boys had first legitimized him as a movie star.
Aside from being Smith’s biggest film role up to that point, Bad Boys allowed him to step outside the network TV–enforced boundaries he had to mind while playing a fictionalized version of himself on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Lowrey had more of an edge than Axel Foley, whom Murphy had played throughout the Beverly Hills Cop franchise, but still managed to be more smooth—even when his cavalier approach drew the ire of his superiors. Where Foley made stiff white cops (a proxy for middle America, circa the Reagan era) feel cool, Lowrey was pure male fantasy adorned with all of the gaudiness of mid-1990s Miami and cranked up to 11. He had the clothes, the car, the crib, and any woman he wanted. Never mind that he was rash, to say the least; he got the job done with style. Seeing all of this in a film that grossed $141 million worldwide informed the perception of Smith. He wasn’t just a TV star anymore; he thrived on the big screen.
By the time Bad Boys ll, with all of its glorious excess, was released in 2003, Smith had begun a record-setting run of eight consecutive films that grossed more than $100 million at domestic box offices. He was in the early stages of Dynasty Mode, and the film featured the maximalist version of Lowrey, who still thrived on chaos. But by the time Bad Boys for Life premiered in 2020, Smith had endured a decade of misfires while the entertainment industry he’d previously dominated shifted around him. Lowrey, meanwhile, was still up to his old antics even though he was entering middle age. He was dyeing his goatee and resisting inevitable change, reckoning, on and off the job, with his mortality, his legacy, and behavior that he was simply too old for. Bad Boys: Ride or Die arrives at a time when both Smith and Lowrey have to accept that they can’t operate as they had before.
The 2022 Oscars occurred at the tail end of an 18-month period when Smith, previously so protective of his image, embraced oversharing. He tried to make things right with Janet Hubert (whom he more recently supported at a book event), The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’s original Aunt Viv, during the show’s 30th anniversary reunion special. He’d never been more candid about his personal life, addressing intimate details regarding his and Pinkett-Smith’s marriage (particularly its turbulence and the public’s interest in it). His memoir, Will, revealed vignettes from his childhood about how he had witnessed his father abuse his mother. The book was published a little over one week before King Richard’s release and became part of the film’s rollout, which involved Smith dropping the veil, speaking his truth (to put things in therapy parlance), and finally abandoning the illusion of perfection as he settled into his “fuck-it 50s.” But Smith’s era of radical honesty always felt like positioning—the best hand for him to play at the time—and left him a bit overexposed. This rolled into Smith’s Oscar campaign, when he continued to discuss his newfound liberation—until he slapped Rock in the face.
Smith had thrived at the nexus of palatable coolness and safe-Black-man mass appeal for years. He had carefully planned his ascent in tandem with his manager, James Lassiter, always being sure to do and say all the right things along the way. At a time when Smith was publicly admitting his flaws, the most aggressive example of them shattered a Hollywood facade during Hollywood’s biggest night. There’s a covenant that’s adhered to, an acquiescence to an unspoken code, in exchange for success in that business. It’s not so much what he did—or even who he did it to—that elicited so much over-the-top outrage. It’s that he had the audacity to do it at an event where the industry was celebrating itself. It’s that he dared not to be civil in a hall of prestige. Then, not only did he stay and accept his award, but he also had the nerve to pose for photos and dance to “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” at the Vanity Fair after-party.
Smith had angled for years to sit at a rotted table. After an uncharacteristic lapse in judgment on the night when he received the honor he longed for, he was excoriated by some of the same people who placed him on a pedestal and helped make him an avatar of respectability in the first place. Now, after Smith receded into the shadows and attempted to make his penance, industry trades like Variety are wondering whether audiences are ready to embrace him again. I suppose that’s a fair question on its face, but considering the disappointment of the summer movie slate (in May, the Los Angeles Times reported that it’s projected to gross just $3 billion in ticket sales from the United States and Canada; this would be the lowest figure since 2000, excluding the COVID-19-affected years of 2020 and 2021), the movie business sure hopes so.
There’s an understandable eagerness for success after the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes brought Hollywood to a six-month standstill last year and curbed studio spending led to more industry-wide constrictions. There may have been a reluctance to work with Smith (who currently has numerous projects listed as being in preproduction) in light of the Slap, but someone will surely champion being among the first to do it if Bad Boys: Ride or Die performs as well as its predecessors. After all, Hollywood, like many other industries, is filled with followers who position themselves as leaders.
Smith may be done playing an idealized version of himself in the public eye, which makes his return to portraying Mike Lowrey all the more apt. It’s now the role he’s played the most times across the most films, and trajectory considered, it’s also the most fitting.
Julian Kimble has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Undefeated, GQ, Billboard, Pitchfork, The Fader, SB Nation, and many more.
