Will Smith did a sit-down interview with David Letterman.
This interview was done before the SLAP, but it does give you some insight into how Will wants to be seen by people and how Jada brings out the darkness in him.
Will gives some very telling quotes to Letterman as he struggles at times to keep up the image he knows people want to see while dealing with the demons and Jada.
“There’s a person that you want to be and a person you want to be viewed as,” Smith explained. “And then there’s who you really are.” Echoing the first line of the self-titled memoir he put out last year, Smith said, “I’ve always thought of myself as a coward.”
Smith went on to say that when he discovered comedy, he came to realize that “negativity cannot exist inside of a human body when you’re laughing,” and he began to use comedy as a “defense mechanism.”
“Ultimately ‘Will Smith’ became a symbol of joy and fun, and when I showed up, I wanted people to be happy,” he told Letterman, “because I found that when my household was that way, I felt safe.”
Not only has Smith’s image as a “symbol of joy and fun” perhaps been irreparably damaged by his actions at the Oscars, but it’s also striking that those actions were a direct attack on comedy itself, the medium that he says was his way of surviving an abusive household.
What Will doesn’t seem to understand is that even though there isn’t any physical abuse in his household, he is still being abused mentally, which is what is causing him to act out irrationally.
Abuse comes in many forms, and the fact that Smith couldn’t take a joke when his who life has been using jokes to combat trauma from abuse says a whole lot about the state of his marriage.
Flip the pages for Will’s interview with Letterman and all the times Jada has embarrassed him publicly.