How Will Smith Ruined His Career, From The Matrix to the Oscars Slap

For nearly two decades, Will Smith was one of the biggest movie stars on the planet. Somewhere along the way, though, this seemingly untouchable actor began making a series of questionable decisions that slowly undermined his career. He passed on some of the biggest movies ever made, became increasingly involved in reshaping the scripts of the movies he did accept, sometimes to their detriment, and watched his carefully cultivated family man image become a public spectacle.

Then, on the very night he finally won an Oscar, Smith walked on stage and slapped Chris Rock in front of millions of people. To understand how one of the most beloved movie stars in the world became one of Hollywood's most controversial figures, you have to go back to the beginning.

A teenage heartbreak set Will Smith on the path to fame

When Smith was 15 years old, his girlfriend cheated on him. Most teenagers would have had their hearts broken and eventually moved on, but Smith came to a rather bizarre conclusion. He decided he was going to become the biggest actor on the planet because, in his mind, if he was famous enough, no girlfriend would ever cheat on him again.

He first found huge success as a rapper and began making more money than he knew what to do with. Unfortunately, he was also spending it faster than he was earning it. So when his next album flopped and the IRS came looking for its money, Smith suddenly found himself famous, unemployed and completely broke.

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air came from an audition in Quincy Jones's living room

This is where his career took an unexpected turn. Smith's girlfriend at the time suggested he stop sitting around the house and go hang out at a taping of The Arsenio Hall Show, where he might meet somebody who could help get his career back on track. While he was there, he met music executive Benny Medina, who was developing a sitcom loosely based on his own childhood. Medina had grown up poor in East L.A., but his life changed when he befriended a wealthy white teenager from Beverly Hills whose family eventually invited him to live with them. Sound familiar?

Medina thought Smith would be perfect for the lead and convinced him to come to a party to meet legendary music producer Quincy Jones, who was helping develop the show. At Jones's house, Smith found himself in a room full of Hollywood executives, including the head of NBC, who all wanted to see him audition right then. Smith wanted a couple of weeks to prepare. Jones wasn't having it, telling Smith this was one of those moments that could change his life. He could audition now or wait two weeks and potentially lose the opportunity altogether.

So they moved some furniture out of the way, handed Smith a script, and had him audition in the living room. Just like that, he landed The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. When Smith and the producers were trying to figure out what to call his character, co-star Alfonso Ribeiro suggested he use his real name, because whatever they called him on the show was what audiences would call him for the rest of his life. He was right: Ribeiro is still called Carlton wherever he goes.

Smith and James Lassiter engineered his movie stardom with science fiction

The Fresh Prince made Smith a household name, but he had much bigger ambitions than being a successful sitcom actor. He wanted to be the biggest movie star in the world. Rather than hoping it would happen, Smith and his manager, James Lassiter, set out to figure out exactly how to make it happen.

They studied the 10 highest grossing movies in Hollywood history and discovered that most of them featured special effects and science fiction. They concluded that if Smith wanted to become the biggest movie star in the world, he should start making big budget sci-fi movies. That's essentially what he did, and the strategy paid off almost immediately. After finding success in Bad Boys, he starred in Roland Emmerich's Independence Day, which became a cultural phenomenon and established him as a legitimate movie star.

Yet when he was approached to star in another science fiction movie about aliens, Men in Black, he initially turned it down. Smith worried that making two alien movies back to back would pigeonhole him as the guy who only made alien movies. Considering the plan he'd concocted, Lassiter thought he was making a huge mistake, and so did the film's executive producer, Steven Spielberg. Spielberg summoned Smith to his house, where Smith arrived by helicopter, and told him in no uncertain terms that he was doing the movie and to trust him. Seeing the posters for hits like Jaws and Jurassic Park on Spielberg's walls convinced Smith, and the film became another massive hit.

Will Smith turned down The Matrix and Inception because he couldn't make sense of them

Smith had an incredible ability to connect with audiences, but he wasn't always the best judge of material. As he became more successful, he started making some truly baffling decisions about which movies to accept and which to turn down.

Perhaps the most infamous example came in 1999, when the Wachowskis approached him to play Neo in The Matrix. He couldn't make sense of their pitch, particularly their plan for the movie's groundbreaking bullet time visual effects. So Smith turned it down and instead starred in Wild Wild West, which became one of the most critically panned movies of his career. To his credit, Smith later admitted he probably would have ruined The Matrix anyway, explaining that at the time he wasn't mature enough as an actor to let the movie and its directors tell the story. He said he probably would have tried to cram more Will Smith style jokes into it.

He didn't learn his lesson. A decade later, Christopher Nolan approached him about starring in Inception, another enormously ambitious, mind bending sci-fi movie that Smith again struggled to understand. Once again, he turned it down.

Smith passed on Django Unchained after trying to rewrite it

Perhaps the most revealing example of Smith's questionable decision making came when Quentin Tarantino approached him about Django Unchained. Unlike The Matrix or Inception, Smith didn't turn this one down because he couldn't understand the story. He turned it down because he wanted to rewrite it.

Smith wanted to give Django more screen time over Schultz, who he felt was the real lead of the movie. He also wanted Django to be the one to kill Leonardo DiCaprio's Calvin Candie, and to turn the film into the greatest love story of all time. Tarantino balked, and Smith passed on the project.

Django Unchained went on to become Tarantino's highest grossing film at the time and won two Academy Awards. One went to supporting actor Christoph Waltz, the actor Smith believed was playing the lead. The other went to Tarantino's screenplay, the very script Smith wanted to change.

Marathon story sessions on Hancock showed how much control Smith had

This wasn't necessarily an isolated incident. By this point, Smith had become enormously involved in the creative development of his movies, sometimes spending entire days working through scripts with writers and producers. Vince Gilligan, who would later create Breaking Bad, worked on Smith's superhero movie Hancock and described marathon story sessions with Smith and producer Akiva Goldsman that could last eight or nine hours.

They would go through virtually every sentence of every scene, questioning whether a joke was funny enough, whether a character's motivation worked, or whether something could be improved. They wouldn't even stop for lunch. Gilligan recalled leaving his first meeting so exhausted that he had to go home and put a cold washcloth over his forehead.

That level of dedication helps explain why Smith became so successful, but it also shows how much control he had over his movies. These weren't films that happened to star Will Smith. They were Will Smith movies, and everything from the scripts to the marketing was built around him. When Hancock was released, it received enormous criticism for its second half, which abruptly abandoned its clever premise about a washed up alcoholic superhero in favor of a convoluted mythology involving ancient superpowered beings and a bizarre love story that felt like it belonged in an entirely different movie.

Alan Tudyk says he was left out of the I, Robot publicity

Or just ask Alan Tudyk, who provided the voice and motion capture for Sonny the robot in I, Robot. Tudyk has revealed that during test screenings, audiences responded more positively to his character than to Smith's. But rather than capitalize on this, Tudyk says he was suddenly excluded from the film's publicity campaign.

His name was barely mentioned, he wasn't included in the promotional tour, and most audiences had no idea he was even in the movie. Tudyk never explicitly accused Smith of being responsible, but Smith was an executive producer.

After Earth was meant to launch a Smith family franchise

As Smith became more powerful in Hollywood, his ambitions extended beyond his own career. He wanted to turn his entire family into a Hollywood dynasty. There was even a reported disagreement during Men in Black 3, with Smith allegedly wanting his son Jaden to play the Colonel's son in the film's final sequence. Director Barry Sonnenfeld reportedly disagreed and cast another young actor instead.

Jaden would appear alongside his father in The Pursuit of Happyness before starring in the 2010 remake of The Karate Kid, which Will and Jaden produced, establishing Jaden as a legitimate young movie star. But Smith had much bigger plans for his son. In 2013, he tried to launch an entirely new sci-fi franchise with Jaden at its center: After Earth, which Smith conceived. His production company developed a 294 page document outlining an entire universe called 1000 AE, complete with movie sequels, television shows, animated series, video games, theme park attractions, comic books, and even an educational program in partnership with NASA. There were also plans for a dedicated social media platform and, perhaps most ridiculously, an After Earth line of cologne and perfume.

The film's central philosophy about overcoming fear and controlling one's emotions closely resembled the teachings of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, while its prominent volcano imagery bore a striking resemblance to the cover of Hubbard's book Dianetics. Because Smith and his wife Jada had previously funded a private school that used Hubbard's educational methods, some critics began to wonder whether Smith was trying to spread Scientology teachings to mainstream audiences through a big budget blockbuster.

When After Earth was released, it was a box office failure, and Smith's plans for an After Earth universe collapsed before they could get started. This one hit him particularly hard. He called it the most painful failure of his career, far worse than Wild Wild West, because he had dragged his own son into it.

Jaden and Willow Smith pushed back against their father's plans

Jaden apparently felt the same way. He had followed his father's instructions throughout the production, only to become the target of enormous public ridicule when the movie bombed. The experience was so damaging that Jaden, then 15, asked about becoming legally emancipated from his parents. He ultimately decided against it, but Smith admitted his son's request had shattered his heart.

Jaden wasn't the only one of Smith's children to push back. At 9 years old, his daughter Willow released the enormously successful song Whip My Hair. Before long she was opening for Justin Bieber on tour, and Smith was once again helping turn one of his children into a superstar. The problem was that Willow didn't want to do it. She wanted to be a normal kid, and during the tour she told her father so and said she wanted to go home.

Smith refused, explaining that they'd made a commitment and had to finish the remaining dates. Willow pointed out that she wasn't the one who had made that commitment, but Smith insisted she continue. So Willow came up with an ingenious solution: she shaved her head completely bald, which was an effective way to end a tour built around a song called Whip My Hair.

Will Smith's marriage to Jada became a public spectacle

Smith's carefully constructed public image of his family no longer seemed to match what was happening behind the scenes, and that extended to Jada. She has admitted that she hadn't wanted to marry Smith in the first place, reluctantly agreeing after becoming pregnant with Jaden, and she has claimed she cried the entire way down the aisle. When Smith spent three years planning an elaborate celebration for Jada's 40th birthday, complete with a documentary about her life, she reportedly accused him of putting on an enormous display of his own ego.

Things became considerably more embarrassing in 2020, when R&B singer August Alsina, who is nearly 20 years younger than Jada and had originally been introduced to her son Jaden, publicly revealed that they'd been in a romantic relationship. Rather than deal with it privately, Will and Jada discussed their marital problems on her Facebook talk show, Red Table Talk, where Jada famously described the relationship as an "entanglement." The resulting conversation was one of the most bizarre celebrity interviews in recent memory.

Jada would later reveal that she and Smith had been separated since 2016, meaning that for years, while they continued appearing together, they were essentially living separate lives. Smith himself acknowledged that their marriage had become unconventional, with both of them pursuing relationships outside of it.

The Oscars slap overshadowed Smith's best actor win

Then came the slap heard around the world. After decades of playing lovable action heroes and charismatic leading men, Smith was on the verge of winning the highest honor in his profession for playing Richard Williams in King Richard. It should have been the crowning achievement of his career. Instead, during the ceremony, Chris Rock made a joke about Jada's shaved head, comparing her to G.I. Jane. Jada, who had publicly discussed her struggles with alopecia, appeared unimpressed while Smith laughed.

After seeing his wife's reaction, Smith walked on stage and slapped Rock across the face, then returned to his seat and angrily shouted at him to keep his wife's name out of his mouth. That reportedly surprised Jada, since the two hadn't called each other husband and wife in years. Academy officials reportedly debated whether Smith should be removed from the ceremony, but he stayed in his seat, and less than an hour later he won the Oscar for best actor.

Rather than simply apologize, Smith delivered a bizarre, tearful and incoherent acceptance speech in which he talked about being called upon by God to protect his family and suggested that love could make people do crazy things. As if that wasn't tone deaf enough, he then attended the Vanity Fair Oscars after party, where he was photographed celebrating and dancing to his own hit Gettin' Jiggy wit It, seemingly oblivious to the controversy he had just created.

The backlash the next day was immediate. Smith eventually apologized to Rock, resigned from the Academy, and was banned from attending Academy events for 10 years. By then, the damage to his carefully cultivated image was done. What should have been the crowning achievement of his career had become one of the most humiliating moments in Hollywood history.

Smith's obsession with control became part of the problem

That's perhaps the biggest irony of Will Smith's career. He spent decades carefully engineering his success, trying to control everything from the movies he made to the careers of his children and the image of his family. But somewhere along the way, that obsession with controlling everything became part of the problem.

Smith may never regain the enormous popularity he once enjoyed. Perhaps the best thing he could do now is stop trying so hard to manufacture it, and maybe just embrace the heel turn.