Even if you didn’t watch the Oscars on Sunday night, you probably heard about Will Smith’s infamous slap. In a nutshell: Host Chris Rock made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s hair. Smith, who has Pinkett Smith has alopecia areata, an autoimmune disease that causes hair loss, had shaved her head, and Rock joked about not being able to wait for GI Jane 2 to come out.
Well, husband Will Smith found this pretty offensive. He found it so distasteful, that he got up in front of the live audience—let alone all the viewers watching—and slapped Rock hard across the face. After sitting back down, he angrily shouted at him, “Keep my wife’s name out of your f*cking mouth,” several times.
Surely, he hit a nerve. But was it grounds for doing what he did? The Internet is torn. Some people are impressed by how Smith stood up for his wife. In fact, not too long after, Smith won the Oscar for Best Actor and received a standing ovation.
Others are downright disgusted by his actions and wish he expressed his anger in a different manner. They think it’s terrible to have used violence, especially when no one was in danger after the comment.
One of those people who did not condone the slap is actor Jim Carrey. Carrey says he is absolutely “sickened” by what went down on stage that night.
“I was sickened,” Carrey began. “I was sickened by the standing ovation. I felt like Hollywood is just spineless en masse. And it really felt like this is a really clear indication that we’re not the cool club anymore.”
Carrey says that if it happened to him, he’d have a lawsuit out in no time. ”I’d have announced this morning that I was suing Will for 200 million dollars.”
His reason for so much money? “Because that video is going to be there forever. It’s going to be ubiquitous. That insult is going to last a very long time,” he said.
Overall, he says that Smith should’ve used a different way to convey his anger at the joke. “If you want to yell from the audience or disapprove or show disapproval, or say something on Twitter or whatever. You do not have the right to walk up on stage and smack somebody in the face because they said words,” he said.
Carrey, who’s gone through some mental illness himself, believes that there’s probably something going on inside Smith’s head that made him react like that. “It didn’t escalate, it came out of nowhere because Will has something going on inside him that’s frustrated. And I wish him the best, I really do,” he said.
“I don’t have anything against Will Smith. He’s done great things, but that was not a good moment,” he concluded.
To hear more about what Carey has to say, check out the video below.
What do you think of how Smith reacted to Rock’s comment?
