Back from the slap: How Will Smith is plotting a return to the big time

Telegraph

28-03-2025

When Will Smith stormed the stage at the Oscars in 2022 and slapped comedian and host Chris Rock, while shouting 'Get my wife's name out of your f---ing mouth', it shattered his public image as the charismatic and funny golden boy, and his status as one of Hollywood's most bankable stars.
Three years later and the 56-year-old actor is clearly hoping we'll all forget 'Slap-gate', as he embarks on a comeback, releasing new music for the first time in 20 years and embarking on a tour across the UK and Europe this summer.
The venues he's playing on his tour seem like quite a fall from grace for an Oscar-winning, Grammy-winning A-lister who is worth a reported $350 million (£270 million). But maybe he just fancied a trip to Scarborough and Wolverhampton this summer?
'Will Smith has been leaning very hard into nostalgia so that audiences will reframe him as that lovable, fun version of himself from before,' says Rachel Richardson, pop culture commentator and creator of the Highly Flammable Substack. 'It definitely feels like a last gasp at rehabilitation for him.'
Smith had largely withdrawn from the spotlight after his assault on Chris Rock for mocking his wife Jada's alopecia, bar the release of his Apple TV drama Emancipation, in 2022, which was a critical and commercial flop.
In the aftermath of the Oscars incident, Smith was banned from the Academy Awards for 10 years, Netflix paused development of his movie Fast and Loose, and revenue of the Will and Jada Smith Family Foundation plunged 83 per cent, leading to the charity's closure.
The first inklings that Smith might be trying to win back public support came at the Coachella music festival last summer, when Smith made a surprise appearance on-stage to sing his 1997 hit Men In Black. Then came the fourth instalment of his Nineties buddy-cop movie franchise Bad Boys, which first debuted in 1995.
Now his album, Based On A True Story, released today, is yet another blast from the past, as Smith teams up with Jazzy Jeff, his collaborator from his Fresh Prince days, and pays tribute to his hit Nineties sitcom by wearing a Philadelphia basketball jacket and baseball hat on the cover. He also went viral on TikTok earlier this month, by recreating a Fresh Prince dance with rapper of the moment Doechii.
Perhaps Smith is hoping that, like his Men In Black character, he can just wipe everyone's memory and it will be 1996 again, when he was smashing it at the box office and in the charts.
Promoting this album is the first time that Smith has talked openly about the moment which derailed his career. 'I can look at [the Oscars incident] as an absolute mess, horrible, terrible – or I can look at it as a really great kintsugi opportunity, to rebuild something beautiful and powerful,' he told the music YouTube channel Genius, referring to the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery. 'I hate admitting that I'm only human – my ego wants to be Superman… The word I was thinking about when I thought about the last couple of years of my life was 'brutaful' – brutal and beautiful.'
Smith also addresses the slap on his new album in the song Beautiful Scars, rapping: 'I hate when I lose it, but I face the music / 'Oh, why did he do it?' See, I'm only human'.
'Since the slap, Will Smith has been skulking below the cultural waterline waiting for the fog to clear,' says celebrity crisis expert Mark Borkowski. 'He hasn't just stepped back – he's evaporated into a curated silence, broken only by the occasional Instagram haiku or self-produced moment of contrition. This isn't reputation rehab, it's a kind of spiritual quarantine.'
Smith was certainly slow to perform a mea culpa – it took him six months to release a video apologising to Chris Rock. And for his critics, his apologies and therapy-speak excuses all seemed like a cynical marketing ploy.
'Now, with new music on the way, he's tentatively in the zone. Smith's decades of cultural capital – his charm, box office clout, that carefully-built good guy image – acted as a sort of reputational firewall. It didn't save him, but it slowed the burn. The real craft begins now,' says Borkowski.
But others aren't convinced. 'Will Smith's return to public life will take more than nostalgia and a few soulful lyrics,' says PR and branding expert Natalie Trice. 'Yes, he wants to be back in the limelight, maybe even a national sweetheart again, but audiences today want to see humility, not celebrity sentiment. There can be trips down Nineties memory lane galore, but if the elephant in the room remains looming in the corner, it risks looking like no real lessons will have been learnt. Emotional intelligence, vulnerability, and leading with creativity rather than controversy will be key, because a lasting comeback isn't just about wearing a back to front baseball cap, it's about regaining trust and taking responsibility.'
Indeed, his flirty performance of his song First Love on stage with Spanish singer India Martinez in Miami in February was mocked by fans. 'This whole thing is cringe,' one wrote. 'Will Smith gives off really creepy old man vibes in this clip. Cringe,' another comment read. A third person said, 'I was waiting for Jada to come out from left stage and smack the s--t outta her for kissing her man.'
Although Smith has finally addressed his violent outburst, he hasn't opened up about the peculiar dynamics of what he once called his 'bad marriage for life'. In 2020, Jada Pinkett Smith admitted to carrying on a multi-year 'entanglement' with the singer August Alsina during a period when she and Will were separated. Alsina has claimed that Will gave the relationship his 'blessing'.
Will and Jada's open marriage has been well-known for years in Hollywood, with Rebel Wilson joking at the 2022 Baftas that Smith's best performance was 'being OK with all his wife's boyfriends'. For Smith, looking like a cuckolded husband wasn't great for his image.
In 2023, while promoting her memoir, Worthy, Jada Pinkett Smith revealed that she and Will had actually been living separately since 2016 and weren't together at the time of the Oscars incident.
Surprisingly, she says that Will's altercation with Chris Rock actually saved their marriage. 'I call it the 'holy slap' now because so many positive things came after it,' she said in December 2023. 'That moment of the s--t hitting the fan is when you see where you really are. After all those years trying to figure out if I would leave Will's side, it took that slap for me to see I will never leave him.'
Smith and Pinkett Smith have been married since 1997 and have two children together, Jaden, 26, and Willow, 24. Smith also has a son, Trey, 32, with his ex, Sheree Zampino. Both Will and Jada have long denied rumours that they are members of the Church of Scientology, but Jada revealed in Worthy that she follows some of the Church's teachings.
Smith certainly seems willing to put in the legwork to win back his fans, hence the tour of smaller UK venues, such as Scarborough's Open Air Theatre. While promoting Bad Boys: Ride or Die he visited eight cities in 12 days, including stops in Dubai and Riyadh, which Smith described as the first Hollywood premiere in Saudi Arabia.
He appeared at the Grammys this year, for a special tribute to Quincy Jones, and has been speaking of plans to revive some of his other big movie hits. During an appearance on Twitch, he said: 'There's a really cool, really cool Hancock 2 idea. We haven't even talked about it so I'm gonna give you one little piece – Zendaya will be being approached for a role in Hancock 2.'
But a run of sequels feels like a far cry from his previous A-list status, when he broke records as the only actor to have eight consecutive films break $100 million in the US box office and often spoke of his dream of playing Barack Obama. But it remains to be seen whether his slap still stings for movie-goers, or if his die-hard fans are willing to be carried along on the wave of nostalgia for 'the old Will'.
'Until now Will Smith has been in a kind of limbo,' says a Hollywood insider who asked not to be named. 'He wasn't completely cancelled as he still had small pockets of supporters and could trade on the memory of his commercial viability, but no one wanted to speak out for him. I do think he has a good chance to come back as there are few people in this industry who were as beloved – or lucrative – as Will Smith was prior to this incident.'
'But at 56, time is ticking on the youthful, sexy, comedic hero which Smith specialised in,' he adds. 'It will be much harder now for him to make that crossover into serious acting like he seemed poised to do with his [Oscar-winning performance in] King Richard. The whole escapade made him seem like a bit of a loser which is not a good look. If his action movies do well at the box office then I think people will forgive and forget. But the best days of his career are well and truly behind him.'