Will Smith opened up about how fame affected his family on the season 3 finale of Kevin Hart’s talk show, Hart to Hart, which aired on Thursday, August 3.
During the sit-down, the Oscar winner, 54, described 2010 as “the greatest year as an artist [and] as a parent,” noting it was the year his son Jaden Smith’s film The Karate Kid hit theaters and his daughter Willow Smith’s debut single, “Whip My Hair,” was released.
“I’m building this dream of a family I’ve had in my mind, [thinking] I’m going to do it better than my father did. We’ve talked about it, my father was abusive,” said Will, who shares Jaden, 25, and Willow, 22, with wife Jada Pinkett Smith. “Pretty much 2010 to 2012 I had achieved everything I had ever dreamed.”
Despite achieving the vision he had for himself and his loved ones, the Emancipation star admitted that “nobody in [his] family was happy” with their newfound fame. He told Hart, 44, that his daughter was “the first one to begin the mutiny” and take a step back from the spotlight.
“It was my first realization that success and money don’t mean happiness,” said Will, who also shares son Trey, 30, with ex-wife Sheree Zampino. “Up until that point, I really believed that you could succeed your way to a house and a family and that you could win your way to happiness. … I was driving the people around me in a way that I was leaving scorched earth around me.”
Willow, for her part, has previously spoken out about losing her sense of “sanity” after releasing “Whip My Hair” when she was 9 years old.
“I had just, like, stopped doing singing lessons and I was kind of in this gray area of, ‘Who am I? Do I have a purpose,” she told her mom during a May 2018 episode of Red Table Talk.
Later that year, Willow spoke more at length about the experience, admitting during a December 2018 episode of the now-canceled Facebook Watch show that it took time to “forgive” her parents for how they handled her musical debut.
“I definitely had to forgive you and daddy for that whole ‘Whip My Hair’ thing,” she told Jada, 51. “It was mostly daddy, because he was so harsh at certain times. It was a couple of years, honestly — trying to regain trust for not feeling like I was being listened to or like no one cared how I felt.” The “Meet Me At Our Spot” singer went on to release five studio albums over the years.
Although Willow had her differences with her father growing up, she extended grace to him after he infamously slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars in March 2022 after Rock, 58, compared Jada — who has a shaved head due to alopecia — to Demi Moore’s character in G.I. Jane.
“I see my whole family as being human, and I love and accept them for all their humanness,” Willow told Billboard in August 2022, shortly after her dad publicly apologized for the incident, which resulted in him being banned from the awards ceremony for 10 years. “Because of the position that we’re in, our humanness sometimes isn’t accepted, and we’re expected to act in a way that isn’t conducive to a healthy human life and isn’t conducive to being honest.”
Jaden, meanwhile, tweeted, “And That’s How We Do It” shortly after the Oscars broadcast ended.
