First things first Rest In Peace Uncle Phil.
Isn’t it crazy how fast time flies? The once Fresh Prince of Bel-Air has somehow transformed into Uncle Phil-lite after 20+ years. Back in March Will Smith posted a photo of himself bungee jumping which many pointed out drew a favorable comparison to Uncle Phil.
Will Smith was on hand at a press conference for his December film Bright, and offered a response to the viral comparison.
We then brought up the bungee jumping video, saying, “I don’t know if you saw, but a lot of fans isolated one moment where they said you reminded them of …”
“Uncle Phil!” said Smith, finishing our sentence. The actor spoke on the comparisons, and got, dare we say, “Phil”-osophical about the interaction between fans and celebrities nowadays. “It is such a new world,” he said. “I released my first record in ’86, so I’m over 30 years in the business. My first album there were no CDs, so it wasn’t until my second album, and they came like these hot new things called CDs. Seeing that transition, essentially the fans being more and more involved in the creative process. In terms of movie stars, it’s a huge difference. It’s like you almost can’t make new movies stars anymore.”
Smith continued, saying, “It’s like there’s a certain amount of privacy and there was a certain amount of distance that you had from the audience, and only on July 4th did you have access. So that amount of access created this bigger-than-life kind of thing. But in the shift into this new world, it’s almost like a friendship with the fans. The relationship is less like the time of Madonna, Michael Jackson, when you could make the Tom Cruise these gigantic figures, because you can’t create that anymore. The shift is to ‘we’re best friends,’ and that’s like with the comments and with those pictures and all that.”
Very insightful. I reread it several times and still couldn’t decipher completely what he’s saying.