Will Smith is coming back from canceled – and speaking his truth.
The 56-year-old Oscar winning actor released his first full length album in two decades, “Based on a True Story,” Friday, addressing the infamous Oscars slap of Chris Rock in 2022 that got him banned from the Academy Awards, and the media frenzy that followed.
“This was the very, very first time that he wasn’t the good guy, that the internet treated him like the villain,” Omarr Rambert, executive producer of Smith’s album, told The Post of the Slapgate aftermath.
“[Now] he just wants to be vulnerable and honest and show other sides of himself.”
Before recording, he sought advice from the biggest names in hip hop, calling up Jay-Z, who told him “Don’t fake your story. You gotta say what’s true for you,” thus inspiring the album’s title, while Kendrick Lamar told him straight — “Man, just say that s—t you always been f—king scared to say,” Smith said on SiriusXM’s Sway in the Morning recently.
Smith is also embarking on a redemption tour, with summer dates across Morocco, Europe and the United Kingdom this summer.
Rumors have also been sparked he is in talks with Netflix to be the subject of its next comedy roast, according to Puck News. A rep declined to comment on that matter.
Cutting straight to the chase, the first song of Smith’s new album, “Int. Barbershop – Day” opens with the line: “Will Smith is canceled.”
Another verse raps, “Him and Jada both crazy, girl, what you talkin’ about? / You better keep his wife’s name out of your mouth,” referring to how Smith told Rock, “Keep my wife’s name out of your f—ing mouth,” after shockingly rushing the stage to slap him at the Oscars.
Will later apologized in a statement, saying he “reacted emotionally” as a result of the joke Rock made about his wife Jada Pinkett Smith’s hair loss condition, alopecia.
A Hollywood producer who worked with Will and Jada told The Post he always likes to have someone around him: “[Will] travels with a therapist. Someone on staff. He never leaves without someone with him. This was before the slap. That’s their full-time job – is to be his therapist. I was told he goes places, and there’s someone that comes with him. It’s a woman.”
A month after the slapping incident Smith retreated to India, where he practiced yoga and meditation. Rambert said it awakened a longing to be more open about his internal struggles and shed the performative “Fresh Prince” persona which first brought him to fame on TV and he has embodied publicly for decades.
“Throughout the years, he kind of boxed himself in as being the Fresh Prince. He was so known for bringing joy in ‘Fresh Prince’ – he didn’t want to put a blemish on it by talking about sadness or pain, but he has that too. It’s a roller coaster ride,” Rambert said.
Last summer, the comeback started with Smith starring in “Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” the fourth installment of the Sony franchise and a win for the box office, raking in more than $400 million worldwide.
“The success of ‘Bad Boys’ really had him like, ‘People love this. Now, I think I can fully, fully express myself,” Rambert said.
Smith recently shared a glimpse into his last few years in a radio interview.
“I was spending more time by myself in the past three years than ever in my life. I got in touch with what I call the despicable prisoners, right? The parts of myself that I necessarily didn’t want people to see … things like fear, you know, things like anger and sadness and confusion,” he told Sirius XM’s Sway in the morning show.
“Based on a True Story” is the first project since Smith’s “Lost and Found” from 2005. He began teasing the project in 2023; then, last June, he performed the gospel-heavy single “You Can Make It” at the BET Awards, centered around a ring of fire accompanied by the Sunday Service Choir.
“The darker the hell you gotta endure/The brighter the heaven you get to enjoy/The harder the fall, the higher you soar/God opens a window when the devil closes the door,” A preacher-like Smith raps on the track.
Ahead of the album release, he returned to Philadelphia to promote the project, where the street outside his former high school, Overbrook, was renamed Will Smith Way. But it wasn’t all red carpets.
“We went to a detention center in Philly – seeing troubled youth. If you can have a conversation with these kids and get through to one or two kids, that’s a win,” Rambert said.
A Hollywood insider told The Post that Smith is “back and moving forward.”
“People have given him some grace. I don’t see it really negatively impacting him so much anymore. Everyone deserves a second chance. If he actually was a bad guy, there would be other stories coming out – it would be harder to repent.”
Record producer Robert Fusari, who produced Smith’s 1999 hit “Wild Wild West,” told The Post how, back in the day at least, Jada called the shots in the studio.
“She wore the pants,” Fusarai told The Post.
“When we finished the ‘Wild Wild West’ record Will said to me, ‘there’s one more step – we have to go through, Jada has to approve the record.
“I thought he was joking – I chuckled and was waiting for him to laugh. Then I [realized], ‘Oh my god, he’s serious,” Fusari said.
“Jada came in and he started playing the record. She was sitting there stone faced. I could see my whole career flash – a minute and 30 seconds in… and she gets up and starts dancing,” which gave him a huge feeling of relief.
Will and Jada were always seen as inseparable and one of the most solid couples in Hollywood. However, the last two years have revealed a very different picture. “Girls Trip” actress Jada dropped a bomb when she admitted on “Today” she and Smith had decided in 2016 they were going to live separate lives, despite publicly maintaining a committed, married front.
During that time, Jada had what she called an “entanglement” with singer August Alsina, 32, who she met in 2015 at the Wire Festival in London, where the Smiths’ kids, Willow, 24, and Jaden, 26, were performing.
“I made a promise that there will never be a reason for us to get a divorce – we will work through whatever and I just haven’t been able to break that promise,” Pinkett Smith said in the 2023 interview. “We live separately.”
However, Rambert clarified Jada and Will are “still very much together.”
“They holiday together. They have date night together. They have family dinners – it’s just like a traditional family. The difference is every single person in the family has their own career – that’s the thing that makes it difficult,” Rambert said.
“Right now, every single family member is in a different place. Jaden was in Paris. We’ve been promoting Will’s project. Jada has her own projects,” Rambert said.
Rambert said the adversity Will faced has brought the family closer together.
“A lot of people that are not in Will’s position would say, ‘You’re rich and famous.’[Well,] he’s still a human being. Having to go on hiatus, feeling like people are against you is not fun, especially when you were the good guy.”
Read the full article here
