Will Smith, 54, appeared to reference the infamous slap he gave Chris Rock for joking about his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, at the 2022 Academy Awards, in a new TikTok video. The actor, who won an Oscar after the viral moment on stage happened, posted a duet clip with Sam Rossi a.k.a. Miss Money Working, a user on the app who encouraged other users to ask an inanimate object what it thinks of them. “This works because everything has consciousness,” she said in her own original video.
@willsmith #duet with @missmoneyworking
Will sat on a couch in the duet video, as he watched her explain on screen how you can ask anything you choose, including a car, a pen, money and/or more what it thinks of you, and your intuition will give you the answer. After she was finished, he grabbed his Oscar statue, which he won in the Best Actor category for King Richard, and slowly brought it into view. He gave off a curious face as if he was thinking of asking the Oscar what it thinks of him after the slap, and began to say something right as the video ended.
The video received a lot of responses and many of his fans commended him on being able to joke about the move he previously admitted he regrets. Others shared their opinions on what the Oscar would think. “What have we learned?” one fan wrote, indicating what the Oscar would say. “You OK, bro?” another person said about the Oscar’s potential response.
Will’s latest video comes almost a year after the slap incident happened and made headlines. He has since issued an apology to all those involved and affected, including Chris and his family. He also shared a six-minute video that went into depth about his remorse. “I am deeply remorseful, and I’m trying to be remorseful without being ashamed of myself,” he said in the video. “I’m human, and I made a mistake, and I’m trying not to think of myself as a piece of s*it.”
Will was banned from the Academy Awards for 10 years, due to the slap, and he recently spoke out about how the negative situation may have impacted the success of his 2022 film, Emancipation. “The only discomfort my heart has around that is that so many people have done spectacular work on this film,” he told Entertainment Weekly in Nov. “I definitely lose a couple winks of sleep every night thinking that I could have potentially penalized my team, but I’m going to do everything I can to make sure everyone gets seen in the light that they deserve.”