Will Smith Reveals Painful 'Fresh Prince' Feud That Could Have Been Solved by Christianity 30 Years Ago
If only Will and Aunt Viv had taken Jesus’ advice from Matthew 18.
If you don’t know who those first two are, you clearly weren’t a child of the ’90s. “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” the landmark sitcom that launched Will Smith’s career as an actor, turned 30 in September. Aside from being a number that made a lot of us feel appallingly old, it also occasioned a reunion special on HBO Max.
It’s unfair to say that reunion specials are about as fun as watching paint dry. They’re usually less fun than that, because usually if you’re observing the wetness of a fresh coat of paint, you have some kind of investment in the product.
The “Fresh Prince” reunion was different for a number of reasons. For one, well, it’s Will Smith. And then there’s the issue of Smith’s feud with Janet Hubert.
For those of you who don’t remember the show, Smith played a character named, well, Will Smith (for all of its charms, “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” wasn’t exactly known for originality) who had moved from West Philadelphia (born and raised) out to the posh Los Angeles neighborhood of Bel-Air, where he was under the guardianship of his Uncle Phil and Aunt Viv. The original Aunt Viv was Janet Hubert, who left the series in season three.
Hubert’s departure was acrimonious, and she and Smith sniped through the media over a quarter of a century. The big news from the reunion, therefore, was the fact the two were face-to-face for the first time in 27 years.
“My painful situation was around the ‘Fresh Prince,’” Smith said on “Red Table Talk” — a show usually hosted by Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett-Smith, but hosted by the “Fresh Prince” star and clinical psychologist Ramani Durvasula for the occasion. “I had a feud, a war of words that I’d been in with Janet that I never thought would get resolved.”
“I really couldn’t see myself celebrating without really dealing with this.”
During the reunion, Hubert said she left due to a bad deal she was offered by the network.
“It was insane,” she said, according to People. “They offered me this really bad deal in the third season. They said, ‘You’ve got two months and two weeks of work and you cannot work anywhere else. So that meant my salary was cut. I had a new baby and a husband who was out of work, so I said no. I did not accept their offer.
“I was never fired, but the misconception was always there. I was trapped — what could I do? They said, ‘OK, then we’re going to recast your role,’ and I said, ‘What can I say?’ I was hurt, deeply.”
It’s alleged that Smith had sabotaged the negotiations, according to TheGrio.
“I’d been banished and they said it was you who banished me because I didn’t laugh at your jokes,” Hubert said. “Then, they ordered me to stay in my room. I couldn’t come out on the stage, and I wasn’t unprofessional on the set. I just stopped talking to everybody because I didn’t know who to trust and the whole negotiation thing was messed up. You guys offered something I had to turn down and I was like, ‘Why?’”
Hubert then asked Smith if he was acting out of being intimidated by her.
“Absolutely,” Smith said. “I just swear [that] my 21-year-old eyes could only see that I felt like you hated me.”
“I didn’t realize the power of my words and how that would affect you and went way too far and said things to people that wouldn’t know how to hold that information,” he continued.
“And then, once you put it in, the machine grabs it then they start putting their own spin on it. It was all way too far on my end. When I look back now, it’s obvious that you were having a hard time.”
He added that growing up in an abusive household was part of the problem.
“So my father was violent in my house. So a part of the whole creation of Will Smith, the joking, [the] fun, [the] silly, was to make sure that my father was entertained enough not to hurt my mother or anybody in the house,” Smith said.
“So, that plucks a childhood space of inadequacy and when someone comes at me like that, the little boy is fully in that space and I would perform and dance and tell jokes, right? People laughing and people having fun was my defense mechanism. I realize the other side of it was, if I cut you bad enough, you wouldn’t be able to respond.”
Hubert said Smith’s actions had cast her as being “difficult” in Hollywood — which was “the kiss of death” for a black actress.
The two were eager to resolve their differences, however: “I felt it was necessary for us to finally move forward, and I’m sorry that I have blasted you to pieces,” she said.
Smith, for his part, said it was “obvious that you were having a hard time and I felt like you hated me. I could not do a 30-year celebration of this show and not celebrate you, celebrate your contribution to the show, celebrate your contribution to my life.”
This was pretty touching stuff, but it’s worth noting (again) that Smith and Hubert’s feud has been going on for over a quarter-century now. And that’s where we get Jesus’ words in Matthew 18:15-20:
“If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.”
For whatever asperities might exist in those verses, they have nothing on the asperities unleashed between Smith and Hubert over the past 27 years. They skipped breaking bread with one another and went straight to the tax-collector phase of the equation.
This is a blueprint for reconciliation and forgiveness. If you believe someone has sinned against you, go to them earnestly. This isn’t out of anger or self-righteousness, but instead out of love.
Their position might be different. Their circumstances might sway you. In Hubert’s case, she certainly had the extreme pressures of the entertainment business. In Smith’s case, there were the emotional injuries of the abusive household. But if you believe you’ve been injured, Matthew 18 makes it clear it’s contingent on you to seek them out.
As the 19th-century Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon said of Matthew 18:15: “Do not say, ‘You must come to me.’ Go to him; he has trespassed against you, it is a personal affair; go and seek him out. It is useless to expect the person who does the injury to try and make peace. It is the injured one who always has to forgive, though he has nothing to be forgiven, it always comes to that, and it is the injured one who should, if he be of the mind of Christ, be the one to commence the reconciliation.”
The reconciliation made “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” reunion, it’s always worth noting. Smith, for his part, is no longer 21. He owned up to his mistakes. Hubert owned up to hers. They put their differences behind them.
“The person I want to be is someone who protects you, not someone that unleashes dogs on you,” Smith said.
Perhaps it took 27 years for him to come to this conclusion. Sitting down in private with the Bible and an open heart before this, however, might have saved them both from the public agony their feud produced.
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