Introducing the Real Will Smith

​​It has been a long, miserable day by the time Will Smith makes his way through the Louisiana mud past hundreds of extras. A positive (false, as it turned out) COVID test on set this morning meant a new round of nasal swabs for everyone. And a series of thunderstorms has delayed today’s shoot for hours—a 30-minute pause is mandated each and every time that lightning strikes, and there have already been dozens.

Nothing has been easy about the making of Emancipation, an Apple TV+ project that tells the story of “Whipped Peter,” the Black man whose tattered back is depicted in one of the most famous photos of an enslaved American. The movie was originally slated to shoot in Georgia, but filming was relocated in response to the state’s attempt to pass new voting restrictions. The current location, deep in the muck about an hour from New Orleans, requires a near daily battle with the terrain. By the time I showed up in mid-July, production was already behind schedule. “We’re at the mercy of Mother Nature,” director Antoine Fuqua told me. “The heat, rainstorms, lightning, mosquitoes, the swamp with alligators.”

And then, of course, there is the subject matter. As I watch the filming from a few feet away, Smith stands beneath a massive railway bridge the enslaved men are being forced to construct. Smoke from the nearby campfires sticks to the skyline above, and the camera catches Smith’s character conspiring in whispers with his fellow workers about how they might find freedom, just out of earshot of their Confederate captors.

“I’ve always avoided making films about slavery,” Smith had told me about an hour earlier as we sat in a production trailer. “In the early part of my career… I didn’t want to show Black people in that light. I wanted to be a superhero. So I wanted to depict Black excellence alongside my white counterparts. I wanted to play roles that you would give to Tom Cruise. And the first time I considered it was Django. But I didn’t want to make a slavery film about vengeance.”

Emancipation is different. It would be a disservice to think of it as a “slavery movie,” Smith explained to me. It’s going to be a David Lean–style epic, he said, with the flavor of an action flick. More Apocalypto than 12 Years a Slave. The story itself is not (just) about the dehumanizing violence of slavery, it’s also about perseverance. Peter is believed to have escaped the Confederacy in 1863 after a harrowing 10-day journey through the Louisiana bayou, joined Lincoln’s army, and then returned to the South to help free those he’d left behind. It’s a difficult story to tell, an even harder one to tell well, and exactly the type that, at this juncture in his life and career, the 53-year-old Smith is yearning to put out into the world.

“This was one that was about love and the power of Black love,” Smith said. “And that was something that I could rock with. We were going to make a story about how Black love makes us invincible.”

For decades, Will Smith was driven by the desire to be the biggest movie star on earth—early in his career, he even came up with a formula based on the top 10 box office successes of all time. He achieved that goal so effortlessly, ruling the July Fourth weekend from 1996 (Independence Day) to 2008 (Hancock), that it’s easy to forget how unlikely it was for a rapper turned actor. But over the last 10 years, as Smith has become increasingly focused on evolving as a human being, a gulf has emerged between Will Smith the movie star and Will Smith the man.

We’ve gotten glimpses of his efforts to close that gap in moments like last year’s Fresh Prince of Bel-Air reunion, when he sat down with the actor Janet Hubert and admitted culpability in her departure from the sitcom. There was also his appearance on his wife Jada Pinkett Smith’s Red Table Talk Facebook show where he opened up about some of the most intimate details of their marriage, which birthed a red-eyed internet meme to rival the Crying Jordan. He’s embraced social media—a young man’s game—with the fervor of the aspiring actor he once was, not the global superstar he is today. And in November, he’ll publish a memoir that reveals new information about his troubled relationship with his father, his adventures in self-actualization during what he calls “the fuck-it 50s,” and the ups and downs of his relationship with Jada.

Before I spoke to Smith, his collaborators and friends kept telling me how great a place he’s in at the moment—that he’s centered, deliberate, and even spiritual. Once we settled in for a conversation, Smith told me that his aim now is “strictly to tell stories that help people figure out how to be happy here.” He continued: “The idea is I spent the first half of my life gathering, gathering, gathering, and now the second half of my life is going to be giving it all away.”

That means making movies like King Richard, directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green and due in theaters this November, in which Smith portrays Richard Williams, the eccentric, hard-nosed father of Venus and Serena. In the grand Smith tradition, it’s an inspiring story of triumph over adversity that contains an affecting character study. The irascible Williams trained both daughters with balls collected from the tennis clubs he couldn’t get into, and protected them from the grind of tennis and the media in a way that makes him look like a prophet of the current moment in which athletes like Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles prioritize their agency and mental health. Smith plays him as a crotchety, unbending, but fiercely loving parent. “My dad was and still is way before his time,” Serena Williams told me in an email. “You see, when someone is different—when they don’t act or look how a person assumed they would—the first reaction is often fear. They think, How do we break them? My dad anticipated that, but he would not allow himself or his family to be broken.”

Smith’s portrayal, Serena added, was so convincing that there were moments she had to remind herself that it wasn’t actually her father on the screen. “Richard Williams is a lot like my father,” Smith explained to me. “So when I first read [the script], I understood what it’s like to want your kids to succeed. I had done it a little bit with my kids. I understood what it was to try to mold a young mind, how it’s different with sons than it is with daughters.”

Emancipation is an even bigger swing, the kind of big-budget script that often lingers in preproduction for years, if not decades. Yet when Smith took the film to studios last year, George Floyd had died and the world had changed.

“The entire world was in lockdown, watched what happened to George Floyd, and stood up with one voice and said, We see it. We agree,” Smith said. “That’s never happened before and with that the opportunities are unlike they’ve ever been. I’ve been trying to get movies made for a long time. And the amount of money that Apple is paying to tell the story [of Emancipation] is unprecedented. And those opportunities are globally present and plentiful.”

In a golden era for Black talent in Hollywood, when funding is available for projects that would once have been overlooked, Smith sees no sense in wondering if the apple is poisoned. “I just want to encourage Black Americans to take the acknowledgment and seize upon the present global opportunities,” Smith continued. “I would just like us to argue less about certain things and pay attention to the big ripe fruit.”

Naturally, I asked him which certain things we should be arguing about less, prompting Smith to slow his sentences and consider his words carefully. “This is a pitfall area,” he told me, before diving into one of the more contentious semantic debates in contemporary politics.

“So ‘Abolish the police. Defund the police.’ I would love if we would just say ‘Defund the bad police.’ It’s almost like I want, as Black Americans, for us to change our marketing for the new position we’re in. So ‘critical race theory,’ just call it ‘truth theory,’ ” Smith said. “The pendulum is swinging in our direction beautifully. And there’s a certain humility that will most capitalize on the moment for the future of Black Americans, without discounting the difficulty and the pain and the emotion. This is a difficult area to discuss, but I feel like the simplicity of Black Lives Matter was perfect. Anybody who tries to debate Black Lives Matter looks ridiculous. So when I talk about the marketing of our ideas, Black Lives Matter was perfection.”

“From a standpoint of getting it done, Black Lives Matter gets it done. ‘Defund the police’ doesn’t get it done, no matter how good the ideas are,” he continued. “I’m not saying we shouldn’t defund the police. I’m saying, just don’t say that, because then people who would help you won’t.”

You can’t blame Smith if he’s confident he knows the best way to tell a story: The man is a natural raconteur. Between takes, I watched as he recalled with his assistants the time, while filming Concussion in Pittsburgh, that they all attempted to make it to an evening showing of Denzel Washington’s The Equalizer, also directed by Fuqua. The driver of the car, a dreadlocked friend named Scoty with a Trinidadian accent to match, had missed the exit—forcing them to take a 22-minute loop in order to turn around. Then, he missed it again. “What’s the point of going to the movies if you miss the trailers?” Smith yelled out, prompting Scoty to throw their vehicle in reverse and back up on the freeway until they got to the exit. Smith told the story at least three times as additional people joined the circle—each new rendition featuring new details, new animated gestures, and an even more refined take on Scoty’s accent—until his staff and security were all giggling with glee.

This November, when his memoir, Will, hits bookshelves, the world will receive the most unvarnished version to date of Smith’s own story. He had wanted to write a book for a few years by the time his team reached out to Mark Manson, author of the mega best seller, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, while Smith was filming 2019’s Gemini Man. “An hour later, I’m on his private jet,” Manson recalled, adding that the entire experience still seems surreal: “Pieces of my brain were splattered against the wall.”

The two spent a few days on the Cayman Islands, getting to know each other and brainstorming. “I’ve spent my whole career hiding my true self from the world,” Manson said Smith told him. “I want this book to show people who I really am.” Later, Smith explained to me that he “just really wanted to totally destroy the clinging to ‘Will Smith,’ trying to separate the image of Will Smith from who I actually am.” By the last day of their trip, Manson presented a rough chapter outline. “Hell yeah, hell yeah!” he said Smith exclaimed, running around the room in excitement. “This is it!”

Smith’s story starts in Wynnefield, the middle-class neighborhood in West Philadelphia where his parents moved the family when he was two years old. “For a young Black family in the 1970s, this was as ‘American Dream’ as you could get,” he writes of the tightly clustered brick row houses. In the book, he discusses what he describes as one of the defining experiences of his life: at the age of nine, watching as his father punched his mother in the side of the head. It was not the only violence Smith saw his father inflict while growing up, but this particular incident, he writes, “has defined who I am today.” His brother jumped up, trying to intervene. His sister fled, hiding in her bedroom. Smith remembers freezing, too scared to do anything. Smith never discussed the violence with his father, who championed his son’s career until he died in 2016. “My father tormented me. And he was also one of the greatest men I’ve ever known,” Smith writes, noting that his father was the one who instilled in him his sense of loyalty and perfectionism. “He was one of the greatest blessings of my life, and also one of my greatest sources of pain.”

For decades, Smith has seen himself as a coward. His desire to please people, to entertain the crowd, and to make us all laugh, he explains, is rooted, at least in part, in the belief that if he kept everyone—his father, his classmates, his fans—smiling, they wouldn’t lash out with violence at him or the people he loved. If he could keep making his mother proud through his accomplishments, he reasoned, perhaps she would forgive his childhood inaction. “What you have come to understand as ‘Will Smith,’ the alien annihilating M.C., the bigger-than-life movie star, is largely a construction—a carefully crafted and honed character—designed to protect myself,” he writes. Later he says, “Comedy defuses all negativity. It is impossible to be angry, hateful, or violent when you’re doubled over laughing.”

“I felt like a combination of having completed some phase of my life, and also with my father dying. I just never would’ve been able to say this stuff about my father beating up my mother,” Smith told me. “I never would’ve been able to talk about that while he was alive.”

The book-writing process was difficult, in part, because Smith wanted to be cautious about the places where telling his own story intersected with telling the stories of others. When the first draft of the manuscript was finished, he convened the people who were mentioned most prominently, primarily family and longtime friends, in Miami. “I read everybody everything I was saying about them,” Smith told me. “I had to get 25 people to come to Miami and hear what I’m saying, because I know people are going to have to live with it forever.”

This meeting was the first time Will had ever spoken with his mother about the times his father hit her. “It was literally the first time we ever discussed [it],” Smith told me. “She had never heard my perception of what happened. So it was really cathartic in a way. It went great. But it was a brutal couple of weeks, man. It was brutal.”

The book fills in the details of Smith’s younger years: how he went from making high school raps in his friend DJ Jazzy Jeff’s basement to the duo becoming the first hip-hop artists to win a Grammy; how he blew his money on cars and girlfriends before borrowing a few grand from a local drug dealer to pay for his move to L.A., where he ended up auditioning for the starring role in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air at a party at Quincy Jones’s house; how he lashed out at his first love, Tamika, after she had an affair; how his first marriage, to Sheree Zampino, ended under the weight of his growing ambition, with divorce papers delivered on Valentine’s Day; and how his jealousy of Tupac Shakur, a close childhood friend of his second wife, Jada, prevented him from ever speaking to the legendary rapper before his death.

Manson said he told Smith that “one of the conditions for this to work for me was that everything needs to be on the table. We can’t have a P.R. person coming in and saying, ‘No, that chapter needs to go.’ ” Smith was more than game, Manson recalled: “Throughout the process there are certain things that came up, and he was like, ‘Why not, let’s put it in.’ I was worried that a lot of stuff was going to get axed. He actually surprised me. ‘Yeah, that’s a little ugly. Let’s keep it in there.’ ”

Most clearly, though, the book provides a detailed accounting of Smith’s deliberate effort to become the biggest movie star in the world. “I wanted to do what Eddie Murphy was doing. I wanted to make people feel how I felt the first time I saw Star Wars,” Smith writes. “I wanted to be Eddie Murphy in Star Wars.” The pursuit began with one of his first roles, in 1993’s Six Degrees of Separation. For a rapper turned actor, it was a bold project—a cerebral play made into a film, based on a true story, in which Smith’s young, gay con artist fools a series of high-society New Yorkers into providing him shelter by convincing them he’s the son of Sidney Poitier.

One of those New Yorkers was played by Stockard Channing, whom Smith has admitted to falling in love with as a result of staying in character throughout filming (a technique, he writes, that he won’t use again). “That’s very lovely to hear,” Channing told me with a flattered laugh. “We liked each other and trusted each other. That’s actually quite rare.” She explained that “everything was easy from the first time we met each other…. He didn’t have a lot of the neurotic stuff that most of us have.”

What soon followed was one of the most commercially successful runs in the history of cinema: Smith’s eight consecutive films grossing over $100 million each at the domestic box office is a record, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Smith’s nemesis for years was Tom Cruise, “the only person who was sustaining a movie career beyond what I could figure out.” After Bad Boys and Independence Day in 1995 and 1996, respectively, Steven Spielberg called, hoping to cast Smith in an upcoming project about a secret police force that works to conceal the existence of extraterrestrials. Smith was skeptical—he’d already done the cop thing, and the alien thing. But Spielberg persisted, and the resulting project was Men in Black, a major pillar of the Smith cinematic canon.

Those three movies alone made Smith a top box-office draw across the world and an unprecedented type of star: a Black actor whom white and global audiences loved. Then, after a couple of relative flops (Wild Wild West and The Legend of Bagger Vance), Smith took his first big swing at serious themes, portraying a decade of growth, turmoil, and protest in the life of Muhammad Ali. “It’s as raw and as great of a performance as any that you can think of,” said director Michael Mann, who still thinks back to a night shoot in Chicago that stretched into the early morning hours. As the two men stood in the snow, surrounded by period cars and storefronts, Smith turned to Mann and asked, earnestly: “Can you believe that people actually pay us to do this?”

“He’s got a lot of balls artistically and as a man,” Mann told me, noting how difficult an assignment playing Ali is. “He’s materially, wonderfully successful—and conscious of that—but he asks himself the most serious and profound questions that every single one of us encounters in our lives.”

After the hugely popular Men in Black and Bad Boys sequels, Smith branched out into apocalyptic sci-fi with I, Robot, costarring Bridget Moynahan. In the film’s most intimate scene, Moynahan learns for the first time that Smith’s character is part robot by methodically inspecting his arm and chest. “I could never get through the take, after the third rib he would start giggling like a little girl,” she recalled. “That’s his charm.”

A few years later, when Moynahan’s relationship with Tom Brady ended—only for her to soon learn that she was pregnant with their child, prompting a tabloid frenzy—Smith reached out to his former costar. “He was the first person to pick up the phone and say come over, let’s talk,” Moynahan told me. “And for somebody like that to make room in his life was impressive.… I’m sure I am not unique. He is that person.”

“That’s what my life is for,” Smith explained to me a few days after I spoke with Moynahan. Both of his parents, as well as his grandmother, had been the kind of people who you called in a time of crisis. And so it’s a role he’s eager to play for others. “That was the thing even with Tom [Cruise]. Tom and I became friends in the middle of his public difficulties. That’s when I want to be there. If everything is great, call somebody else. Call me when you need help. I love it. I love being the 2 a.m. emergency phone call.”

It wouldn’t be quite accurate to describe Will as a happy book. It’s at turns comedic and inspirational. But even though he’d gotten everything he’d set out for—the Grammy and global fame, a beautiful and successful wife, children who are themselves superstars—Smith still wasn’t happy. His movies weren’t reaching the same mountaintops as Independence Day and Men in Black. And his single-minded pursuit of stardom had left many of his closest relationships battered and bruised.

“Throughout the years, I would always call Denzel. He’s a real sage. I was probably 48 or something like that and I called Denzel. He said, ‘Listen. You’ve got to think of it as the funky 40. Everybody’s 40s are funky.’ He said, ‘But just wait till you hit the fuck-it 50s,’ ” Smith told me. “He said, ‘Just bear with your 40s.’ I stopped and I was like, ‘The funky 40s and the fuck-it 50s.’ And that’s exactly what happened. It just became the fuck-it 50s, and I gave myself the freedom to do whatever I wanted to do.” Many of those things are detailed in the book, and others he’s still keeping close to the vest. “Some things are for GQ articles and some things are not,” he told me.

And so Smith set out on a journey to find himself, and find happiness. He rented a house in Utah and sat in solitude for 14 days. He traveled to Peru for more than a dozen ayahuasca rituals, even though he’d never even smoked weed and barely drank. (“This was my first tiny taste of freedom,” Smith writes of his first experience. “In my fifty plus years on this planet, this is the unparalleled greatest feeling I’ve ever had.”) He opened a stand-up show for Dave Chappelle. He began traveling without security for the first time, showing up in foreign countries and working his way through the airport crowds unaccompanied. “I totally opened myself up to what, I think, was a fresh sampling of the fruits of the human experience,” Smith told me.

During his first meeting with Michaela Boehm, an intimacy coach he spent years working with, Smith confessed that, if he could have anything in the world, he’d want a harem of girlfriends. “Who?” Boehm demanded, insisting he name specific women he’d want to invite to his harem. Misty Copeland, Smith replied. And Halle Berry too. For the rest of the session, the two of them researched specific women who could round out his aspirational harem. The plan was to then begin contacting the women.

“I don’t know where I saw it or some shit as a teenager, but the idea of traveling with 20 women that I loved and took care of and all of that, it seemed like a really great idea,” Smith explained to me with a laugh. “And then, after we played it out a little bit, I was like, ‘That would be horrific. That would be horrific.’ I was like, ‘Can you imagine how miserable?’

“What she was doing was essentially cleaning out my mind, letting it know it was okay to be me and be who I was. It was okay to think Halle is fine. It doesn’t make me a bad person that I’m married and I think Halle is beautiful. Whereas in my mind, in my Christian upbringing, even my thoughts were sins. That was really the process that Michaela worked me through to let me realize that my thoughts were not sins and even acting on an impure thought didn’t make me a piece of shit.”

Smith’s relatively late career embrace of social media is another storytelling experiment. He’s become one of the internet’s buzziest celebrities, offering fans and followers a glimpse of him on set, embracing weird memes, and shooting TikToks and video clips specifically engineered to go viral.

“That was one of the things I learned with James Avery on Fresh Prince. James made it very clear, you are not a famous rapper here,” Smith recalled. “If you want to be successful, you’d better humble yourself to this craft. I never forgot that idea: When you start something new, humble yourself to the craft.”

He started studying Liza Koshy, who’d leveraged her success on Vine and YouTube into acting roles, and who advised Smith to stop trying to be so perfect. Social media thrives on the perception of authenticity. It was fine if he flubbed a line or his lighting wasn’t perfect in a TikTok. Smith started shooting some of his videos on his iPhone, as opposed to professional camera equipment. He took cues from Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart, who impressed him with the way they’d share behind-the-scenes moments from their movie shoots—something that would have been unthinkable in the Hollywood that Smith had come up in.

“They were doing unheard of stuff, posting pictures from set. You can’t post pictures from set a year before the movie comes out—Oh, shit, yes you can,” Smith recalled thinking. “I just saw how they invited people into the process in a way that I thought you weren’t allowed to do.”

Bright, the 2017 film Smith starred in for Netflix, was the first to use his content studio, Westbrook Media, to produce social media from the set. After a career of getting excited about scripts that the public might not see on the big screen for years—I Am Legend, for example, took over 10 years to get made—there was something intoxicating about shooting, editing, and getting a video clip out to the public in just a matter of hours. “It completely changed how I interacted with the world and how I interacted with my creative life. I wanted to create fast and put it out.”

Sometimes he runs his ideas for posts by his children. Other times, when he’s traveling, the Westbrook Media team reaches out to local social media influencers to set up Creator Days, in which he meets up with a bunch of them to make content. “To just be able to make things, without an outcome goal that had to do with being the biggest movie star in the world, back to the feeling in [DJ Jazzy] Jeff’s mom’s basement of making music. It was fun. We were experimenting, we were trying things.

That’s what’s happened again for me with social media,” Smith told me. “It’s such a powerful way for me to keep in touch with people and, creatively, what the next thing is about to be. The next phase of my life is going to be the most creative and expansive of my entire life and career.”

Smith’s foray into social media also comes at a time when he and Jada have become Hollywood’s most transparent and vulnerable couple. Red Table Talk, the Facebook show hosted by Pinkett Smith, is the closest thing the digital age has to the role Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Phil once played on broadcast television—a place for difficult, messy conversations about love, sex, drugs, and everything else, often featuring their daughter, Willow, and Jada’s mother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris. Smith himself has appeared on the show, most notably for a frank discussion with Jada about a period of non-monogamy in their marriage. “The pursuit of truth is the only way to be happy in this lifetime,” Smith told me. “And we sort of came to the agreement that authenticity was the release from the shackles of fame and public scrutiny.” When you tell the truth, the pair reasoned, you never have to fear being found out.

As we sat in a trailer on the Emancipation set, heavy raindrops pattering against the metal roof, Smith had a question for me. I was one of the first people he’d spoken to, or at least one of the only ones who didn’t work for him, who had read the draft of his book manuscript. And so he wanted to know what I thought. I told him the truth: I’d enjoyed it, but I’d wondered about how he had decided which details of his marriage to include and which to leave out.

Throughout the draft that I’d read, Smith had dropped in foreshadowing tidbits about marital acrimony. Jada, her husband writes, hadn’t wanted a traditional wedding ceremony but gave in to his pressure: “This would be the first of many compromises Jada would make over the years that painfully negated her own values.” Years later, Smith persuaded her to move into a massive 256-acre compound that she was dead set against purchasing. “Nothing good comes from spending your hard-earned money on a ‘family home’ that your wife doesn’t want,” Smith writes. “You are putting a down payment on discord and for years you will be paying off a mortgage of misery. Or, worse.”

The harsh reality for those who love a dreamer is that everything comes second to the dream. As Smith’s stardom grew, his wife would wake up many mornings in tears. At one point, she turned down an opportunity for her band to open for Guns N’ Roses so that Smith could continue shooting The Pursuit of Happyness. Things reached a breaking point by Jada’s 40th birthday, in 2011. Will had spent three years planning a private family-and-friends dinner in Santa Fe, where he screened a documentary he’d commissioned that chronicled her life and traced her family’s lineage back to slavery (and in which he tracked down a descendant of the white family who once owned Jada’s ancestors.)

When they got back to the hotel suite that night, Jada was nearly silent. “That was the most disgusting display of ego I have ever seen in my life,” Smith recalls his wife telling him. The two began fighting so loudly that a 10-year-old Willow, with whom they were sharing the suite, emerged crying with her hands over her ears, begging them to stop. “Our marriage wasn’t working,” Smith writes. “We could no longer pretend. We were both miserable and clearly something had to change.”

And then, a little abruptly, the book’s narrative about Will and Jada ends. In the early version of the manuscript that I read, there was no discussion of any outside relationships, on his behalf or hers. When I mentioned this to Smith, he asked me: “You felt cheated?” Now, look, I’m a reporter. I certainly read that manuscript ready to jot down any and every detail about who and what Will and Jada may have been doing during the more open parts of their past decade. But the reality is, a fair amount of what’s missing played out in public. At some point, their relationship stopped being monogamous.

“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. There were significant endless discussions about, what is relational perfection? What is the perfect way to interact as a couple? And for the large part of our relationship, monogamy was what we chose, not thinking of monogamy as the only relational perfection,” Smith told me. “We have given each other trust and freedom, with the belief that everybody has to find their own way. And marriage for us can’t be a prison. And I don’t suggest our road for anybody. I don’t suggest this 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.”

Smith grappled with whether to include all of that stuff in the book, and it was clear that the final version could look different than the one I saw. But ultimately he decided to leave many of the most personal details out. There was no way to chronicle the parts that happened next from solely his own perspective. There was no way to tell his story without telling others’ too. “It felt like it was a whole book unto itself,” Smith explained.

In July 2020, following public revelations of what Jada would describe as an “entanglement” with the R&B singer August Alsina, a tabloid frenzy ensued and Will and Jada took themselves to the Red Table for a 12-minute discussion of the dynamics of their relationship. This did not necessarily clear things up. “The public has a narrative that is impenetrable,” Smith said. “Once the public decides something, it’s difficult to impossible to dislodge the pictures and ideas and perceptions.” Because the impetus for the Red Table Talk was Alsina’s disclosures, a viewer could have walked away thinking that Jada was the only one engaging in other sexual relationships, when that was not, Smith delicately explained to me, in fact the case. Or take one of the memes spawned by their discussion, a screenshot of Smith looking stern-faced and droopy-eyed. “It was midnight and we were going on vacation the next day,” Smith explained, noting that the details they were discussing were, by that point, years in the past. “It was like, no, no, no, guys, I’m not sad. I’m fucking exhausted.”

It was clear that Smith had more to say. I could feel him rubbing up against the guardrails that he and Jada had established about what they would discuss publicly. He told me he’d talk with Jada, but when we spoke again a few weeks later, he said he wasn’t sure he wanted to go much deeper.

I was supposed to be disappointed. But, after reading about the work he’s done to break his addiction to affirmation, to free himself of the need to please, it was hard not to be proud of him for sticking to a boundary. “It may seem hard to believe, but I would lose sleep over not giving you the answer that I know you could use,” Smith told me. “I want to help you, I want you to succeed, I want you to have a headline. But by the same token, I don’t want to deal with the backlash of that in the world. To say I don’t want to talk about that three years ago would have been fucking excruciating for me.”

For decades, Will Smith has been gracious to every interviewer. He gives you 90 minutes after agreeing to an hour. And then when he’s done, he walks outside to take photos with every fan, smiling for each and every one.

But Will? The real Will, not the character he’s been playing for our benefit? He gets to say no to the 100th selfie of the day. He gets to keep some things private, even when he knows your story would be better with just a few more details.

“The major difference is I tell the truth, even when people don’t like it,” Smith told me. “And Will Smith doesn’t.”

Wesley Lowery is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist.

A version of this story originally appeared in the November 2021 issue with the title “Unvarnished.”

PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photograph by Renell Medrano
Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu
Hair by Pierce Austin for iTalent Company
Skin by Judy Murdock for iTalent Company
Tailoring by Marie Stagg and Mary Hillen
Set design by Chere Theriot
Produced by 138 Productions
Location: Race + Religious, New Orleans, LA