Will Smith Could Have Been the Cary Grant of Our Time
... except for that one little mishap. Or: What happens when celebrities do psychedelics and then run around talking to everyone about it.
Will Smith could have been a psychedelic savior, but then that one thing happened.
There was a time when the strongest opinions about Smith regarded whether it was okay for him to be tinted blue when he played the genie in the live-action version of Aladdin in 2019. Then came the Oscars slap, and no one knew what to do anymore about this man who was, as far as I can tell, widely admired before this mind-boggling glitch in this increasingly glitchy timeline we call the 2020s. As Wesley Morris wrote in The New York Times shortly after last year’s Oscars incident, “So why the eventual shock? For one thing, it wasn’t Kanye West who’d lost it. It wasn’t Martin Lawrence. … The source of Sunday night’s disruption is the winner of 10 individual Nickelodeon Kid’s Choice Awards.”
It’s not just the Kid’s Choice Awards, either. It’s the classic sitcom with a theme song that a large swatch of Millennials and Gen Xers can recite by heart, it’s the Oscar nominations and Grammys and blockbusters and the unique combination of having recorded “Parents Just Don’t Understand” and credibly played Muhammad Ali. It’s also the overwhelming charisma and charm. You could not overstate Smith’s star power before The Incident.
In the lead-up to last year’s Oscars slap, Smith was somehow hitting an even higher high than he’d previously reached, doing a victory lap of publicity as he published his memoir Will and approached his (well-deserved) Oscar win for King Richard. And during that run of publicity, he talked openly about his experiences with psychedelics: In November 2021, he talked to Oprah Winfrey, the queen of disseminating new spiritual experiences to the American masses, about how he’d taken ayahuasca more than a dozen times in supervised ceremonies in Peru and found it invaluable in navigating marital problems with his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. In an even more headline-grabbing revelation, he told David Letterman on the former late-night host’s excellent Netflix show My Next Guest Needs No Introduction that during one trip, he had visions of his career being destroyed. The interview was taped before the Oscars slap and aired afterwards, so it was hard not to read his experience as not just psychedelic, but psychic. But if you looked beyond the premonition of it all, what was truly remarkable was how well Smith explained the psychedelic experience overall, and how much real wisdom he seemed to have gained from it.
He looked like an ideal spokesman for the Psychedelic Renaissance, the Cary Grant of our time—an actor everyone knew and loved, speaking openly and eloquently of psychedelics, with the potential to change public perception about them and help make them available to more people who could benefit from them.
Instead, he’s become the Slap Guy, and even if he eventually rehabilitates his image, it will be with an asterisk. A year after the slap, it’s still resonating. His film Emancipation, in which he plays a formerly enslaved man, got no Oscar love for a reason. The man he slapped, Chris Rock, recently did a live Netflix comedy special in which he showed no signs of forgiveness toward Smith. In fact, his set was uncharacteristically (if understandably) bitter and disorganized, going after Pinkett Smith and the couple’s marital struggles, a sign he’s still struggling to make sense of it himself.
Of course, the slap has far worse consequences for, say, the image of Black men in America than it does for the future of psychedelics. But it’s still a study in ripple effects and lost opportunities.
Smith overcame a difficult upbringing in West Philadelphia, with a father he’s described as abusive, to become the Fresh Prince, a fun and accessible rapper who broke into the mainstream in a big way in the late ‘80s with “Parents Just Don’t Understand.” (If you haven’t listened to it lately, I highly recommend it; it’s truly one of the great storytelling raps of all time. In fact, watch the iconic video, too.) He segued seamlessly into a major sitcom star on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and then into a serious actor and box office draw with Six Degrees of Separation and Bad Boys. From there, it was mostly up and up and up, with a combination of serious Oscar-baiting roles and charming comedic roles.
So you can imagine (at least a little bit) what it felt like when he had this terrifying vision while drinking ayahuasca in South America: “I drank, and it usually takes about 45 minutes to kick in. And I’m sitting there, and you always feel like, ‘Maybe it won’t kick in this time.’ So, I’m drinking and sitting there, and then all of a sudden, it's like I start seeing all my money flying away, and my house is flying away, and my career is going away. My whole life is getting destroyed.”
But he also had many uplifting insightful moments during his ayahuasca experiences. He writes in his memoir, Will, referring to ayahuasca as “Mother,” per common practice: “Mother repeated, for what felt like five hours straight, ‘Stop talking.' She said it so many times I wanted to bang my head on the floor. She was referring to the constant inner chatter that runs incessantly in my head—planning, strategizing, debating, assessing, critiquing, self-judging, questioning, doubting.” He says that he eventually gave into these messages to “surrender,” adding, “She had watched me batter myself for so many years trying to impose my Will on the world. Her point was, if I stopped talking and thinking so much, I could see and sense the universal tides and I could align my energies to them and achieve twice as much with half as much effort.”
The fact is, these are real insights, and he speaks and writes eloquently about them. (Bonus points for the “Will” double-meaning there, which could be seen as a little ego-centric, but also kind-of wise; he was specifically imposing a version of himself on the world that he needed to dismantle.) “You see yourself in a way you’ve never seen yourself,” he told Letterman in the Netflix interview, while also nodding to the substance’s long history of use by shamans. Letterman asked if it’s addictive, and Smith said, accurately, that it is absolutely not: “You don’t want no parts of it,” he said, adding that he wanted to cry when he went back for a second night of ceremony. It’s riveting to watch. Smith knows how to captivate an audience and explain complicated ideas, adding comic relief at just the right moments. He explained that he learned that almost all of the pain we experience in life is brought on ourselves, out of fear of things that haven’t actually happened, but that we imagine might happen. He learned from ayahuasca, he said, that “I trust me to be okay no matter what happens.”
Letterman was impressed: “You are one introspective motherfucker,” he told the actor sincerely.
Of course, this was recorded before the slap, only to air afterwards, which makes it both more fascinating to watch and a little sad.
It’s still hard to tell what will become of Smith, though his introspection does not seem to have dimmed his desire to make a career in movies. Meanwhile, it’s unlikely that his public sharing of his ayahuasca experiences will have much of a negative effect on public perception of psychedelics. But he could have been such a boon to the movement … except for that one thing. Of course, psychedelics don’t need celebrities. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that the more celebrities weigh in, the less cool psychedelics become. (Or is that just that the more Gwyneth Paltrow, specifically, weighs in, the less cool they become?)
But cool isn’t really the point if we want to reach widespread acceptance to the point of legality, not to mention medical insurance coverage. It’s hard to say, for instance, that meditation and yoga are truly cool these days—but they are helping millions more people now than they were in, say, the ‘70s and ‘80s, when they were seen as fringe practices until they were embraced by the mainstream. In America, this usually comes with a boost from famous people and the media. The Psychedelic Renaissance could use a Christy Turlington or a Madonna, a Beatles or a Jerry Seinfeld.
For now, we’ll simply have to take the lesson from Smith that a person can be an introspective motherfucker sometimes, and still lose control other times. I believe that he gained a lot of wisdom from ayahuasca. But people can be multiple things, including wise in some moments and impetuous, violent, and self-destructive in others. As Smith proves to us, all the wisdom in the world can’t save you from the consequences of your worst actions.