It's been nearly 30 years since The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air flip-turned the world of
sitcoms upside down.
While Will Smith has since adopted a wide range of roles, he might have gotten some
good training in drama on the set of this hit TV show.
Here are the dark secrets of the cast of Fresh Prince.
Will Smith was not chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool when he signed on to star in The
Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
He was staring down some pretty serious IRS debt from his career as a rapper alongside
DJ Jazzy Jeff.
In a 2018 episode of YouTube's Storytime, Smith admitted that he'd spent all of his
money on exorbitant purchases like expensive cars and fancy clothes after the duo's album,
He's the DJ, I'm the Rapper, went triple platinum and earned a Grammy.
But his follow-up effort flopped, which didn't really help bolster his dwindling bank account.
"I spent all my money.
And I didn't forget, but I didn't pay the IRS."
At the time, Smith owed the IRS a whopping $2.8 million.
Opportunity fell into Smith's lap when he met Fresh Prince producer Benny Medina while
hanging out on the set of The Arsenio Hall Show, and later had an impromptu audition
during a party at Quincy Jones' house.
Smith landed the lead, but the IRS took 70% of his Fresh Prince paycheck for the next
three years.
Aunt Vivian, who served as the Fresh Prince's beloved, sympathetic matriarch, is a woman
with many facets.
Two, to be exact.
Janet Hubert played the role during the sitcom's first three seasons, but was fired in 1993
and replaced by Daphne Maxwell Reid.
The firing apparently had less to do with Hubert's rumored on-set feuds and more to
do with a dispute with network executives, who reportedly had, quote, "some sort of vendetta
against her," per Hubert's interview with Jet at the time.
Years later, in 2013, the actress opened up to The Grio about the real reason she was
recast, claiming NBC was unwilling to negotiate her ultra-restrictive contract.
She said:
"It was a negotiation that should have come back like most do.
We were a very successful show and I felt like I was an integral part of that, and felt
valuable, but you cannot feel valuable in Hollywood."
Hubert sued the network and Will Smith for allegedly creating "a hostile work environment"
during her pregnancy, according to the New York Daily News.
This led to long-running rumors that NBC fired Hubert because of her pregnancy, but it was
written into her final season with the show.
"Philip!"
"Vivian!"
"Philip!"
"Vivian!"
"Wilma!"
Janet Hubert's feud with Will Smith is so intense that it outlived the series by literal
decades.
Hubert blamed her 1993 contract dispute on Smith, telling Jet:
"[Smith] probably is responsible for my firing.
He has a lot of clout.
[...] He has gotten me fired from the show and now he is trying to snatch my career away
from me."
In an earlier interview with an Atlanta radio station, Smith said that Hubert wanted the
series to be The Aunt Viv of Bel-Air Show.
He added
"No matter what, to her I'm just the Antichrist."
In addition to calling Smith an "egomaniac" nearly two decades later, Hubert said in 2009
that both Smith and Alfonso Ribeiro, who played Carlton Banks, "destroyed" her career with
"untruths," presumably about her bad attitude.
She even reportedly begged Smith and his manager to clear her name.
While the jury is still out on that, Smith did call Hubert "brilliant" and a "really
powerful artist" in an interview with BBC Radio 1Xtra in 2016.
Janet Hubert undoubtedly had her issues with Will Smith, but she might actually have more
beef with her on-screen son, and for pretty good reason.
Alfonso Ribeiro, who went from dancing as Carlton Banks to literally winning Dancing
With the Stars in 2014, went after his TV mom with a scathing comedy set in 2009.
In a since-deleted video of the stand-up performance unearthed by Perez Hilton, Ribeiro claimed
Hubert was "crazy" and "went nuts" during her time on Fresh Prince.
Even though he admitted he wasn't legally, quote, "allowed to talk about it," the actor
dished,
"There were days when we were all on the set and she would literally go off on people,
and they got to a point by the time the second season came around where we're like, 'This
is unacceptable.'
[...] We felt like, when we were doing The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, that we were a family.
[...] She, at that point, ruined that, and she made it very difficult for us to work."
This may have been what led to Hubert's claims about Smith and Ribeiro's "untruths."
Considering the show aired during an era before text-message receipts and cell phone cameras,
we'll probably never know the exact truth of the matter.
"You hate me, don't you?"
Carlton was one of The Fresh Prince's most iconic characters, and he certainly wouldn't
have had the same magic if he was portrayed by anyone other than Ribeiro, but that was
almost exactly what happened.
Ribeiro was actually fired before he really got started.
In an interview with Digital Spy in 2017, the actor admitted that he landed the role
after an audition, but after filming the pilot, producers decided that Carlton should be recast.
It's almost inconceivable, but they did eventually come to their senses.
Riberio said:
"There was a moment where essentially I was hired and rehired – you may look at it that
way!
There was a large chance that the Carlton character would have been played by somebody
else.
But luckily enough, the decision was made to continue to have me do it – and I guess
the rest is history."
History, indeed.
It takes someone very special to pull off those colorful outfits.
Long before Donald Trump was tweeting from the White House, he enjoyed the most bizarrely
random acting career with cameos in dozens of major motion pictures and TV shows, including
Home Alone 2: Lost In New York and The Nanny.
One of these appearances was actually on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, but the future president
reportedly wreaked minor havoc on set.
Trump appeared in the 1994 episode "For Sale by Owner," and according to an anonymous crew
member who spoke to Newsweek, the businessman was apparently pretty peeved about something
that probably had to do with the script.
Earlier that day, he'd reportedly expressed concern to executive producer Gary H. Miller
that his lines weren't funny enough.
Miller claimed he'd never give Trump advice about real estate, but he does know comedy,
and told him, quote, "Trust me, you'll get a laugh."
"I like keeping a low profile."
Later, the real estate mogul allegedly ended up throwing the clipped-together pages of
The anonymous crew member told Newsweek,
"I started to help her pick them up, and [Maples] goes, 'I got 'em, I got them, I'm so sorry.'
It was such a really rude thing, the way he did it.
So terrible.
So disrespectful [...] He just wasn't pleasant."
According to Business Insider, Alfonso Ribeiro sued the creators of Fortnite for allegedly
copying his "Carlton dance" in 2018.
The lawsuit claimed the dance was written into an emote called "Fresh" in January of
that year.
The emote could be purchased for around $8, or 800 v-bucks, which meant Epic Games seemed
to be making money from the actor's moves - that is, if Ribeiro actually owned them
to begin with.
A side-by-side comparison does show the dance moves to be nearly identical.
However, according to The Hollywood Reporter, a supervisory registration specialist in the
U.S. Copyright Office's Performing Arts Division later explained that Ribeiro's copyright request
"must be refused" because his choreography was just a "simple dance routine."
Even so, since the dance was created for Fresh Prince, it's likely that NBC would own any
related copyright if it was indeed allowed to be copyrighted.
All of this boded poorly for Ribeiro's case, as well as the similar lawsuit he lobbed at
Take-Two Interactive over dance moves featured in NBA 2K.
According to USA Today, the actor dropped both suits in March 2019.
There's a reason Will Smith was able to pull out a tear-jerking performance in the season
4 episode "Papa's Got A Brand New Excuse"...
"How come he don't want me, man?"
...he felt intimately acquainted with disappointing father figures.
While it appears he patched things up with his dad later in life, at least according
to an interview on The Graham Norton Show in 2019, the star revealed that his troubled
past with an abusive father had led him and his wife to set some major boundaries, including
avoiding the use profanities with each other for over 20 years.
In an episode of Jada Pinkett Smith's Facebook Watch series Red Table Talk, Will Smith recalled
telling his wife,
"I grew up in a household where I watched my father punch my mother in the face."
Because of that, he said, he couldn't tolerate profanity and violence in his relationships.
Tatyana Ali, who played Ashley Banks, had one of her most embarrassing moments - a major
life milestone - on set.
In an interview with Us Weekly in 2018, Ali admitted she had her first real kiss on the
show, but said it was, quote, "terrifying."
It didn't help that both Alfonoso Ribeiro and Karyn Parsons, her on-screen siblings,
decided to come to set that day to watch it happen even though they had nothing to do
with that particular scene.
Ali told the magazine,
"I just remember Karyn Parsons, who played Hilary Banks.
Karyn, Alfonso [...] And we had our cameras [...] The cameras on sitcoms are, like, huge
cameras.
And I just remember them looking behind the camera [...] I mean, who has a first kiss
like that?
At the time, I wanted to die."
Since then, Ali has managed to recover and seems to have a healthy attitude about romance.
The actress even told HuffPost in 2013 that one-night stands were her "guilty pleasure."
Who would ever want to watch a sitcom starring a rapper?
That's what Karyn Parsons was thinking when she first heard about Fresh Prince.
While speaking with NPR in 2014, the actress revealed that she'd been working as a restaurant
hostess in Hollywood before landing the sitcom role — which she seriously questioned taking
or even trying out for.
Parsons said of her first audition,
"I remember my first reactions being, 'Oh, God, it's a sitcom with a rapper?
Like, what's that?'"
Regardless of her initial feelings about the show itself, she also felt like she wasn't
a good fit for Hilary.
The character was originally an effortlessly cool model, which made the TV star feel like
trying out was "ridiculous" because she's, quote, "not a model type."
Instead of playing the role as it was written, however, Parsons gave Hilary her signature
bratty attitude, which is exactly what landed her the part.
But she continued to work at her day job until Fresh Prince took off, just to be safe.
For years, rumors have been flying around claiming that the recurring scene in which
Will's friend Jazz gets kicked out of the Banks' mansion was actually only shot once
because the network wanted to save money.
In truth, it was shot multiple times, just not every time the script called for it.
Jeffrey A. Townes, a.k.a. DJ Jazzy Jeff, opened up about this myth surrounding Fresh Prince
in an interview with HuffPost in 2015.
According to the actor/DJ, budget had nothing to do with the shot.
Rather Townes eventually put his foot down because he couldn't endure the pain it caused.
"When I did it maybe the third or fourth time, because every time you shoot it to get a take,
you probably have to do it about 40 times.
Literally, black and blue by the time they say, 'We got it.'
And it got so bad the last time, and I was like, 'I can't do this.
I'm not a stuntman.
I can't do it.'"
Jeff has stayed safely behind the turntables ever since the show ended.
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