He says he regrets responding to "hate" with hate.
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Will Smith
peter1221 — 11 months ago(April 14, 2025 11:07 AM)
He says he regrets responding to "hate" with hate.
https://www.cinemablend.com/movies/will-smith-honest-most-painful-thing-about-oscars-slap-what-he-learned
The King Richard star has been busy as of late, promoting his new music. While doing that, he recently made a stop at San Diego’s Observatory North Park theater. It was during that show that the A-lister discussed a number of topics (and distanced himself from the Diddy memes that have been making the rounds). Later, as shared by @SKTheKingYT on X, the Bad Boys star got candid about the slap’s aftermath and explained how he processed the incident:
After the Oscars, I was kinda – y’all heard about that? … I kooked out. I kooked out for a minute, but I’m back. … I took a couple of years, you know, to really look at who I am, who I want to be. And, all of a sudden, about six months ago, music started coming out of me again like, I had so many new ideas, so many things I wanted to say. And it was like – I was trying to figure out how to get it out and what’s the artform and music and poetry was like the only way that I could express even the contradicting things I was feeling in my heart.
The 56-year-old father of three went on to share more thoughts on the slap, at which point he revealed that the “most painful” part of it was that he “responded to hate with hate.” Nevertheless, the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air star also shared that he had an epiphany while thinking over the televised moment later:
In terms of the Oscars, the thing that was most painful for me is I responded to hate with hate, and that never works. That never ever works. The amount of other people that got hurt, you know? And one of the ideas that came through is – I was really just running it over and over in my mind – one of the things that landed is everybody’s going through something. Every single person is having a hard time with life.