Will Smith has been dominating the box office and getting jiggy with it for longer than
some of his fans have been alive, but the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air wasn’t born with
a silver spoon in his mouth.
Want to know more?
This is Will Smith’s tragic real life story.
Will Smith may be a world-famous megastar, known for hit movies like "Independence Day"
and "Men in Black" as well as his successful music career.
But once upon a time, the Fresh Prince was just a scared child who lived in fear of his
violent father.
In his book "Will," the actor described the "brutal temper" that came over his father
when he drank.
As a 9-year-old, Will Smith's life was changed forever by seeing his father hit his mother.
The actor wrote in his memoir,
"Within everything that I have done since then — the awards and accolades, the spotlights
and the attention, the characters and the laughs — there has been a subtle string
of apologies to my mother for my inaction that day."
Smith believes it was his responsibility as the eldest brother in the family to step in,
but he didn't act on that sentiment.
"I had 14 great birthdays without him.
He never even sent me a damn card.
To hell with him."
Like many great entertainers, Will Smith's knack for comedy was fueled by his sad childhood.
He told GQ in 2021,
"Comedy defuses all negativity.
It is impossible to be angry, hateful, or violent when you're doubled over laughing."
According to Smith, he developed the comic timing behind "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air"
as a survival tactic.
His role as the entertainer in his family meant that he could solve a tense situation
by joking around.
But it didn't always work, as he noted, and when his father continued to be abusive, the
young boy blamed himself.
In 1989, Will Smith spent a night in jail after his bodyguard Charles Alston assaulted
record producer William Hendricks.
Not long after he won the first ever award for Best Rap Performance at the Grammys, the
musician got involved in a brawl that landed him at "rock bottom," as he told Oprah in
an exclusive interview.
"When it rains, it pours.
So getting into the fight at the radio station, Charlie punching the dude that landed me in
jail, so the money is gone, the car is gone.
I am laying on the floor in a jail cell and I am like, 'You've got to be kidding me!
I won a Grammy eight months ago.'"
Will Smith is a millionaire, but his bank account hit some speed bumps on the way there.
Although he became a star thanks to 1988's "Parents Just Don't Understand," his second
hit single with DJ Jazzy Jeff, he didn't hold onto financial success for long.
On his YouTube channel, the star revealed the story of his issues with the IRS before
he became a household name on television.
He said that while their earlier album had exploded, the follow-up project with DJ Jazzy
Jeff was a flop.
"I had spent most of my money.
Like all of it.
I spent all my money."
While he didn't forget about his taxes, he did neglect to write a check when Tax Day
rolled around.
As he told Oprah,
"I wasn't paying attention to that kind of stuff."
The IRS repossessed his big-ticket purchases.
Luckily, Smith's financial situation actually led him to finding his way into acting.
After his girlfriend at the time told him to go on Arsenio Hall's talk show, the young
rapper met an executive called Benny Medina, who had been planning a TV show based on his
own life.
And soon "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" was born.
Will Smith admitted in a 2020 "Red Table Talk," that,
"Divorce was the worst thing in my adult life.
Divorce was the ultimate failure for me.
I've been hurt a lot in my adult life, but I don't think anything touches the failure
of getting divorced from my 2-year-old son's mother."
As noted in a 2021 GQ interview, his first wife, Sheree Zampino, ultimately served him
with divorce papers on Valentine's Day.
He began dating Jada Pinkett while he was still married to Zampino.
And all three of them had to figure out a co-parenting situation with his 2-year-old
son Trey when Jada started living with Will.
As Jada explained on a special episode of "Red Table Talk" that featured Zampino,
"Because I did not understand marriage, I did not understand divorce, I probably should
have fell back."
In March 2021, Will Smith opened up about the racism he faced growing up Black in Pennsylvania
on the podcast “Pod Save America.”
He revealed that he's been called the n-word several times, and that during his time as
a Hollywood A-lister, he recognized some of the ingrained racism within the industry.
"At the core of it, I noticed a difference between ignorance and evil."
Smith continued to say that,
“They're twins, for sure.
Ignorance can be educated.
Evil is a much more difficult problem."
In an interview with Stephen Colbert, he compared race relations in America to a marriage that
needs counseling.
"I always look at things in terms of relationships so when I think about race relations in this
country now, there's a thing that happens before things are cleaned up.
There's a darkness before the dawn that is always difficult.”
He continued to say,
"When I hear people say it's worse than it's ever been I disagree completely.
We are talking about race in this country more clearly and openly than we have almost
ever in the history of this country.”
"Racism is not getting worse, it's getting filmed."
Will Smith and his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, have been open about facing difficulties in
their marriage over the years, but their biggest stumbling block might have come in 2011.
As he recounted in his memoir, Will had prepared an elaborate party for her 40th birthday.
The three days of festivities included painting lessons, a documentary he commissioned about
Jada's family, and much more.
In his mind, Will was providing the perfect birthday, but to Jada, it was nothing more
than an over-the-top display of her husband's ego.
She was done with the weekend, and Will decided he was done with their relationship.
The couple decided to separate temporarily and Will coped by retreating into ayahuasca
with the help of a shaman.
The actor wrote,
"I was floating deep in outer space ... I was trillions of light-years away from earth."
Eventually he reunited with Jada, restoring their unconventional marriage.
As Uncle Phil on "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air," the actor James Avery became a paternal figure
to Will Smith — both on-screen and behind the scenes.
So Smith was just as devastated as the rest of the world when Avery died in 2013 after
open heart surgery went wrong.
Smith wrote in a tribute posted to his Facebook page,
"Some of my greatest lessons in Acting, Living and being a respectable human being came through
James Avery.
Every young man needs an Uncle Phil.
Rest in Peace."
And when the cast of the classic sitcom reunited in 2020, he reflected on the lessons that
the older man taught him.
"James Avery was this six-foot-four, 300-pound stage-trained Shakespearean beast and I'm
the little rapper from Philly under him and I wanted him to think I was good."
"It's…it's him."
Smith recalled how they improvised the iconic scene in which Smith's character is abandoned
by his dad.
"And I fall into his arms at the end of the scene, he's holding me and he's holding me.
He whispered into my ear, 'Now that's acting.'"
In a special video from the whole cast in 2020, Smith called Avery a rock, sharing how
he helped Smith's career decisions as well as helping to hone his acting abilities.
"He was Uncle Phil, father, protector, teacher, defender, preacher, to everybody.
Everybody on the set was his kids.”
As one of the biggest movie stars in the world, Will Smith hasn't experienced many big flops.
But the sci-fi survival film "After Earth," which happens to also star his son Jaden Smith,
became a notorious failure.
As Deadline reported at the time, the high-budget action film earned $26.5 million during its
opening week, despite the studio expecting that it would take at least $40 million.
And the critical response was brutal, especially toward the young Jaden.
Will later admitted to Esquire in 2015,
"That was the most painful failure in my career.
‘Wild Wild West' was less painful than 'After Earth' because my son was involved in 'After
Earth' and I led him into it.
That was excruciating."
Getting into why he stepped away from the movie business for a short while, he said,
"I had to dive into why it was so important for me to have number-one movies.”
Will believed that his competitive determination to be the best made him hold onto a mindset
from childhood.
"All I have to do is make sure that no one's ever better than me and I'll have the love
that my heart yearns for.
And I never released that and moved into a mature way of looking at the world and my
artistry and love until the failure of 'After Earth,' when I had to accept that it's not
a good source of creation."
The failure of "After Earth" was quickly put into perspective by some personal news: Will
Smith found out that his father had cancer in 2016, just after the movie star started
working on a film about cancer.
He told USA Today,
"I said yes, and three weeks later, my father was diagnosed.
Having to face my father's mortality and impending death while I was preparing for this role
gave us a really wonderful interaction during that time."
Smith explained that they were able to speak about topics they had never explored before
and be honest with each other.
Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith's marriage came under a lot of public scrutiny in 2020
when the latter was linked to August Alsina.
In an episode of "Red Table Talk," the couple addressed the headlines about Jada's "entanglement"
and explained their nontraditional marriage.
One shot of Will seemingly in tears went viral, although he denied crying in GQ.
He insisted,
"It was midnight and we were going on vacation the next day.
It was like, no, no, no, guys, I'm not sad.
I'm f—ing exhausted."
The actor also clarified that they hadn't been traditionally monogamous for a while,
saying,
"Jada never believed in conventional marriage.
Jada had family members that had an unconventional relationship.
So she grew up in a way that was very different than how I grew up."
They apparently had many conversations about how to negotiate their marriage, particularly
after their 2011 split.
He shared that,
"We have given each other trust and freedom, with the belief that everybody has to find
their own way."
He also acknowledges that what works for them may not work for everyone.
"I don't suggest our road for anybody, but the experiences that the freedoms that we've
given one another and the unconditional support, to me, is the highest definition of love."
Will Smith has also been honest with his fans about how he struggled with his mental health
when he was younger.
In his memoir, the actor shared that he thought about committing suicide when he was 13, after
his mother finally left his father.
He wrote,
"She'd had enough.
She went to work the next morning and didn't come home.
She didn't go far — just a few blocks to (grandmother) Gigi's house — but the message
was clear: She was done."
After that turn of events, Smith contemplated suicide, writing that he only considered it
a couple of times in his life.
He recalled,
"What kept ringing in my mind was a faint memory of hearing Gigi say that killing yourself
was a sin."
Decades later, Smith addressed those suicidal thoughts on his YouTube series "Best Shape
of My Life," which tracked the actor's journey with his mental and physical health.
He even spoke to his mother about his memories from that time, confessing that he felt cowardly
for never stepping in between his parents.
If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide
Prevention Lifeline​ at​ 1-800-273-TALK (8255)​.