“That was a rage that had been bottled for a really long time”: Will Smith Confesses He ‘Really Lost It’ When He Slapped Chris Rock, Hints He Might Have Been Dealing With Wife Jada Pinkett Smith Cheating on Him For a Long Time
Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscar ceremony was an event that spread far and wide. The memes kept on coming, the backlash kept rolling out, and people sat with popcorn having their fun. Smith took his time to come forth with a serious apology, but his relations with Rock remained tense.
Recently, the Pursuit of Happyness star made his first appearance on a late-night show after the infamous incident. And it was impossible to get through the interview without the slapgate row coming up, and it did.
Did the Oscar slapping incident happen due to bottled rage?
Will Smith was recently a guest on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and he recalled the moment when Chris Rock made the GI Jane joke about Jada Smith and Smith “smacked the sh*t out of” the comedian. According to the 54-year-old actor, it was all due to pent-up feelings that found an inappropriate and untimely release.
“I was gone. That was a rage that had been bottled for a really long time.”
The Aladdin actor further went on to recall that he was “going through something” at the time that made him lose his cool. He said,
“That was a horrific night as you can imagine. There’s many nuances and complexities to it, you know, but at the end of the day, I just – I lost it and I guess what I would say [is] you just never know what somebody’s going through.”
Smith however did not explicitly mention what exactly he was going through during the fateful night.
Will Smith evades questions about what he was allegedly “going through” when he slapped Chris Rock
Instead of a clear answer, the Bad Boys actor kept going in circles and giving ambiguous answers about why he did what he did. Trying to define what he was “going through”, the father of two said on the Comedy Central show,
“It was a lot of things. It was the little boy that watched his father beat up his mother. It’s, you know, all of that just bubbled up at that moment. That’s not who I want to be.”
