Will Smith hasn’t done a single interview since the Oscars earlier this year, when he caused a scandal when he punched Chris Rock in the middle of the ceremony. Now, for the first time, Smith has opened up about the incident in an interview in The Daily Show.
The 2022 Oscars were marked by a scandal that Hollywood will probably not forget for a long time: in the middle of the ceremony, Will Smith went on stage and hit comedian Chris Rock after he had directed a joke at Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.
Despite his performance, Smith was allowed to remain at the gala, where he was later awarded the award for Best Actor. Shortly thereafter, the Academy decided to bar Smith from the Academy Awards for the next ten years. At the same time, they apologized for having handled the situation incorrectly, something they said was due to being “unprepared for what had never happened before”.
“I lost it”
Smith has publicly apologized to Chris Rock several times after the incident, but he has not allowed himself to be interviewed about the matter – until now. When the actor appeared in The Daily Show on Monday he opened up about the scandal to host Trevor Noah:
“It was a terrible night,” he said. “There are many nuances and complexities to it but in the end I just lost it.
Rock’s joke was about Jada Pinkett-Smith’s short haircut, which is recovering from her alopecia for a few years. But his wife’s condition was not the only reason behind Smith’s outburst, according to himself:
“The [berodde på] many things: it was the little boy who saw his father beat his mother, you know. All that just bubbled up in that moment. That’s not the person I want to be,” he said. “It was an anger that had been suppressed for a very long time.”
Source: E.T
