Photo Credit: Getty Images
Chris Rock is choosing to keep his reflections on the incident in which Will Smith slapped him at the 2022 Academy Awards simple.
Rock, 61, spoke with Variety in an interview published Tuesday, Sept. 8, as he prepares to debut his new movie as a director, Misty Green, at the Toronto International Film Festival. Misty Green stars Rosalind Eleazar as an actress battling extremes “to keep both her career and brother alive” while on the verge of comeback, per an official synopsis from the festival.
Though Variety noted that Rock’s interview was his first sit-down piece since the 2022 Oscars, he declined to delve deeply into what happened with Smith, 57, four years ago.
“Hey, man. You know, to answer your question a little bit, I wish nothing would have happened,” he said when asked how he feels about the Smith incident today. “And also, I don’t want to say anything that takes any attention away from Rosalind and how good she is in this movie. It’s a crazy world. We walk by homeless people. There’s all sorts of s--- going on right now. Me having a bad day is not the biggest — it’s not that important.”
Smith slapped Rock onstage at the Oscars in 2022 after Rock made a joke about Smith’s wife Jada Pinkett Smith while Rock presented an award. Smith, who later publicly apologized to Rock for his “unacceptable” actions, was subsequently banned from the Oscars ceremony for 10 years. (Smith won his first Academy Award for his performance in 2021’s King Richard at the same ceremony.)
Rock has since addressed the incident in his stand-up comedy, but he seemed largely uninterested in revisiting the topic while speaking with Variety and said he “never even thought about” a detail in his new movie in which Eleazar’s character is described as having previously struck a colleague.
The actor-director instead refocused on gratitude.
“A long time ago, I went to a comedy club on a freaking whim,” he told Variety. “I got onstage and did about five minutes, and the owner of the club said, ‘You should come back.’ If he didn’t say that, I probably wouldn’t have come again. That one night changed the whole trajectory of not just me, but my whole family.”
