The Untold Truth Of Will Smith

In his 2000 hit "The Real Slim Shady," Eminem called out Will Smith in a profane couplet that seemed to speak to widespread resentment of the rapper-actor in the hip-hop community, where coarse lyrical content is equated with artistic merit and adhering to the genre's truth-telling aims. "Will Smith don't gotta cuss in his raps to sell records," Eminem rapped. "Well, I do, so f*** him, and f*** you, too."

Smith, in his Fresh Prince days, got substantial airplay because his material was relatively harmless and thus more approachable and playable under FCC restrictions. And he almost never uttered a bad word in his early songs. But he had a reason.

"I started writing my raps when I was about 12," Smith said on "The Graham Norton Show." One day his grandmother found the notebook where he kept all of his song ideas and snippets. "And I had all my curse words and my four-letter words and everything in there." Instead of lecturing him, Smith said, she scribbled a note in the back of the book. "She wrote, 'Dear Willard ... truly intelligent people do not have to use words like this to express themselves. Please show the world that you're as smart as we think you are." And so, he kept it light and clean, except for his 1991 track "You Saw My Blinker," a dark, cuss-laced violent fantasy about exacting revenge on a bad driver.

A talented, engaging, and successful actor, Will Smith only took up the craft because he was broke. According to Time, his second DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince album "He's the DJ, I'm the Rapper" went triple-platinum and generated the big hits "Parents Just Don't Understand" and "Nightmare on My Street." Young and abnormally flush with cash, according to Smith's YouTube series "STORYTIME," Smith blew through his fortune on cars and designer clothes. But then, the money basically ran out because the next Fresh Prince album, "And in This Corner," sold poorly, according to CNBC.

During his initial period of wealth, Smith had declined to pay his taxes. The IRS seized his pricey luxuries, and as quickly as he'd become rich, Smith was suddenly broke and in debt. Understandably in a bad mood over his situation, his girlfriend at the time suggested he go hang out at a taping of "The Arsenio Hall Show," which is where he met music executive Benny Medina, who told Smith he wanted to make a show about his teen years, when he moved out his dangerous East Los Angeles neighborhood and next to a wealthy family friend in Beverly Hills. Not long after, Medina took him to a party at the home of entertainment mogul Quincy Jones, and the three guys re-worked Medina's pitch into a show that Jones produced called "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air," which easily kept Smith financially afloat.

After a few well-received seasons of "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air," Will Smith had proved to be a decent actor, and he started to appear in movies. One of his first was the 1993 film adaptation of John Guare's Tony Award-nominated play "Six Degrees of Separation." In his most complex work to that point, Smith played a young man named Paul, who claims to be the son of famed actor Sidney Poitier and a college friend of the Harvard-educated children of two wealthy New Yorkers (Stockard Channing and Donald Sutherland) — whom he scams.

Paul is a gay character, and Smith had difficulty with that element. When it came time to film a scene in which Paul briefly kisses a man played by Anthony Michael Hall, Smith refused, according to Entertainment Weekly. Director Fred Schepisi brought in a stand-in for Smith, and shot him from behind. Months after the incident, when "Six Degrees of Separation" hit theaters, Smith was embarrassed about his behavior. "It was very immature on my part," he said. "I was thinking, 'How are my friends in Philly going to think about this?' I wasn't emotionally stable enough to artistically commit to that aspect of the film."

Meanwhile, co-star Ian McKellen made sure Smith smooched a man. At "an early preview" of the film, McKellen told The Independent, "I met him in public outside the cinema and gave him a great big kiss on the lips."

While Will Smith showed that a Black man could appeal to huge audiences of any race, his racial identity often played into what roles he chose. According to the podcast "On One With Angela Rye" (via Billboard), he purposely avoided roles explicitly written for a Black character or that were about the Black cultural or historical experience, aiming to appear in movies that were seemingly above and beyond the issue of race — both to set an, and lead by, example. "I needed to be as high, and fly as high, as I could possibly fly so that young Black kids would see — and really all kids — could see that type of flying as not something that only white movie stars could do." He wanted the public image of Will Smith to be one that Black children "could aspire to," in other words.

That mindset changed, or at least adopted another layer, in 2020. After the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May 2020, and the worldwide groundswell for the Black Lives Matter and anti-police brutality movements that followed, he signed on to star in "Emancipation," his first film about slavery. "The reason I chose 'Emancipation' now is more than ever, we have to understand the reality of where we came from," he shared.

In 2014, according to Vox, Sony Pictures planned to release its big-budget comedy "The Interview," about a journalist and his producer who venture to North Korea to interview and take out the country's hardline leader, Kim Jong Un. Seeking a canceled release of the movie, a hacking collective called the Guardians of Peace broke into Sony's servers and then stole and leaked countless emails, many of which contained embarrassing conversations about A-list actors like Ryan Gosling and Leonardo DiCaprio.

It would seem that not everybody likes Will Smith, or at least his two children, Jaden and Willow. In 2014, the home-schooled celebrity offspring were profiled by T Magazine, and they came across as, well, idiosyncratic. "Time for me, I can make it go slow or fast, however I please, and that's how I know it doesn't exist," said Willow. Jaden, meanwhile, professed to "have a goal to be just the most craziest person of all time." According to The Daily Beast, Tom Rothman, an executive at Sony subsidiary TriStar productions, forwarded a link to the interview to Sony Pictures co-chair Amy Pascal. "1. Read this. 2. they r home schooled: don't let this family date your movies!!!"

Will Smith brushed the whole affair aside. "Everybody disses my kids," he told Variety. "And somebody's email is private, you know? So I would never hold anybody responsible for something they said in a private email."

Will Smith seems to enjoy being a parent. "From the time I was 6 years old, I wanted to be a father," Smith said on a Father's Day edition of "Red Table Talk" (via CheatSheet). Professionally, Smith has touted paternal effort, in his top 20 hit "Just the Two of Us," a remake of Bill Withers and Grover Washington Jr.'s classic but with rap lyrics about his bond with his son, and in the 2019 Apple TV+ documentary "Dads."

In his personal life, however, Smith has experienced some dad-related hardships. He was once estranged from Trey, his son with first spouse Sheree Zampino, according to Today. "We struggled for years after my divorce from his mother," Smith captioned an Instagram post of himself and his son in 2018. "He felt betrayed and abandoned," adding that they reconciled and that Trey now considers his father his best friend.

With second wife Jada Pinkett Smith, Smith has two kids, actor Jaden Smith and musician Willow Smith. In 2014, according to the New York Daily News, the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services launched an investigation of the Smith parents after 20-year-old actor Moses Arias posted to Instagram a photo of himself lying shirtless in bed with Willow Smith, who was 13 years old at the time. Authorities cleared the elder Smiths, who asserted that Willow was old enough and smart enough to make her own decisions, of any wrongdoing or endangerment.

Since the mid-1990s, studios have paid Will Smith a fortune when they want him to star in a movie. According to Complex, "Bad Boys" netted him $2 million in 1995, and "Independence Day" brought a $5 million paycheck. By 1998's "Enemy of the State," his asking price was $14 million. In 2012, Smith earned $100 million for "Men in Black 3," including salary and a cut of box office revenues, per The Hollywood Reporter. As of 2019, his baseline acting fee stood at $20 million, per THR, although he took cuts to $12.5 million each for "Aladdin" and "Gemini Man," and bumps for "Bright" and a sequel, collecting $27 million and $35 million, respectively, per Variety.

Smith has other money channels, too. "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" reruns still air in syndication in nearly 200 countries around the world, and with those come big royalty payments. In 2019, Fast Company estimated the market valuation of Just Water, the packaged water company he started with his son Jaden, at $100 million. He also expanded beyond his TV and film production company into new media and technology with a holding company called Westbrook Inc. And years ago, Smith put a large sum of cash into a venture capital fund that received a windfall because it was one of the first inventors in Uber.

Altogether, and as of 2021, Will Smith's net worth, per Celebrity Net Worth, stands at $350 million.