Will Smith addressed his Oscar slap controversy recently and revealed his 'bottled' rage led him to slap comedian Chris Rock on stage at the Oscars in March 2022. During the promotion of his next film Emancipation on Trevor Noah’s show, Will opened up about the incident. As Trevor asked Will about what happened that night, the King Richard actor said, “That was a horrific night as you can imagine. There are many nuances and complexities to it but at the end of the day, I lost it.”

Will then looks at the studio audience and explains how everyone has their own journey and the people in the studio might be going through their personal difficulties, even as they share the same space with strangers. “I guess what I would say, you just never know what somebody is going through. In the audience right now, you are sitting next to strangers and somebody’s mother died last week, somebody’s child is sick, somebody just lost their job, somebody just found out their spouse cheated,” he said. “You just don’t know what’s going on with people. I was going through something that night. Not that that justifies my behaviour at all,” the actor added.

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When Trevor Noah asked Will Smith what he had learnt from this experience, he said that people need to be nicer to each other. “We just got to be nice to each other. It’s hard and I guess the thing that was most painful for me is I took my hard and made it hard for other people,” he said.

The actor said that he understood “how shocking it was for people” and how it was “a rage that had been bottled for a really long time."