The 2023 Oscars are upon us, and if we look back for a moment and go back to a year ago, we also remember that the 2022 Oscars will – unfortunately – also be remembered for the crime of Will Smith’s slap against Chris Rock. A slap that cost Will Smith dearly, effectively disqualified for 10 years by the Academy and who found himself in the middle of a media hurricane that hit him after the reckless gesture made during the awards ceremony. In all this time, Chris Rock, the one who suffered the slap, has said little or nothing about that evening: a few jokes here and there, at most, never anything definitive. Well, things have changed now.
A year after that night, Chris Rock spilled the beans and talked about Will Smith. He did it on a show on Netflix, during the special ‘Chris Rock: Selective Outrage‘, the platform’s first live-streamed comedy show. Rock went wild against Will Smith.
Chris began like this: “”You all know what happened to me. Still it hurts. I have ‘Summertime’ still ringing in my ears. But I’m not a victim… I took that blow like Pacquiao. I will try to put on a show tonight without offending anyone. I’ll do my best, because you never know what might be triggered. People always say words hurt…anyone who says words hurt has never been punched in the face.”
Chris Rock dwelled on the relationship between Will Smith and his wife: according to the comedian, Will’s repressed anger led him to give that slap during the Oscars, not Chris Rock’s joke. In practice, according to Chris Rock more than with Rock himself, Smith was mad at his wife: “We’ve all been cheated on, everyone in here has been cheated on, even though none of us has ever been interviewed by the person who cheated on us on television.” – said Chris Rock, referring to an interview in which Will Smith’s wife revealed to her husband that she had had another affair. “She hurt him way more than he hurt me. He f***ed his son’s friend.”
Rock then spoke about why he didn’t react to Will Smith’s slap, saying: “A lot of people ask, ‘Chris, how come you didn’t answer anything?’ Because I have parents, that’s why. And do you know what my parents taught me? Never argue in front of white people.”
