(Los Angeles) A year after being slammed by Will Smith in front of a global audience, American comedian Chris Rock finally hit back on Saturday, unleashing his punches in a stand-up number that aired on the Netflix platform.
Posted at 9:05 am
In March 2022, the American actor took the Oscars stage and met the comedian, who had just poked fun at the very short haircut of his alopecia-suffering wife, actress Jada Pinkett Smith.
Minutes later, Will Smith received the Oscar for Best Actor for his role in King Richard.
He then apologized to Chris Rock, but was sidelined for a decade from the Oscars, the next edition of which is March 12.
The comedian refused to press charges and has remained almost completely silent about the incident ever since. But on Saturday night’s stage in Baltimore, he went berserk, accusing the Hollywood star of “selective outrage” and claiming he was after a lesser man because he was upset his wife had cheated on him.
“Will Smith is exercising selective outrage,” Chris Rock said during the show, streamed live on Netflix, a first for the platform.
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He recalled that Will Smith was widely mocked after an episode of his wife’s Facebook show, Red Table Tgalk, in which the couple spoke about their affair and how it affected the actor.
” Why do that? he asked. “Everyone called him a bitch. They called his wife a predator,” he said, noting that he was trying to “support the actor when the information was released.”
According to Chris Rock, Jade Pinkett Smith’s animosity towards him stems from an event that happened a few years earlier when she urged him to boycott the Oscars because her husband wasn’t nominated for his 2015 film Concussion.
“She said … a grown man should quit his job because her husband wasn’t named after concussion [commotion cérébrale]. Afterward, [Smith] gives me a concussion,” he joked. “What is this mess? So was I joking about it? We do not care ! “.
” People [me] ask “Does it hurt? “. It still hurts,” he said, referring to the slap he received.
“Will Smith is definitely taller than me. Will Smith played the role of Muhammad Ali in a film. Do you think I auditioned for this? ‘ he started.
The comedian, who appeared angry at times during his show, said he’d always liked Will Smith before the slap, first as a rapper and then as an actor.
“He had made great films. I’ve supported Will Smith my whole life.” But now he has said he sides with the slave owner who beats Will Smith’s character in his latest film, Emancipation.