In the film, Paul talks about how honorable, clean-cut, and almost boring his faux-dad Sidney Poitier is, explaining, “If I wanted to write a book about him, I really can’t. No one would want to read it. He’s decent, and I admire him.” For a time, the sentiment in that quote would have certainly applied to Smith as well. By the early 2000s, Smith had become the contemporary version of Poitier, or as Channing’s character Ouisa Kittredge described him, “the single greatest Black star in movies,” if not in sheer talent, then in popularity and public goodwill. After many years of being a fundamentally decent, wholesome, good-looking box office king, it seems that the vicissitudes of the contemporary entertainment business — aka a string of critically panned box-office disappointments — forced Smith to shift publicly into someone people want to read about now.
The influence of the internet and streaming TV made Smith more of an open book. In 2017, Smith joined Instagram and quickly became an influencer; he currently has over 60 million followers. His profile, where he posts stunts and family vacations, has gradually made the actor more interesting. Jada Pinkett Smith’s popular Facebook show Red Table Talk, where she dishes with her mother and daughter on a bevy of social topics, has allowed the formerly private family to be a lot more candid — though on their own terms, of course. Most impactfully, there was the “entanglement” fiasco of 2019, when Pinkett Smith’s former lover August Alsina revealed their relationship and the Smiths did a joint Red Table Talk interview to address the scandal. It permanently changed the way people perceived the previously tight-lipped couple.
Smith’s memoir included his admission to wanting, at one time, a “harem” of 25 girlfriends including Halle Berry and Misty Copeland; his falling in love with Six Degrees of Separation costar Stockard Channing; and his jealousy of Tupac Shakur, Pinkett Smith’s childhood friend. “In the beginning of our relationship, my mind was tortured by their connection. He was ’PAC! and I was me,” Smith wrote. “He had a fearless passion that was intoxicating, a militant morality, and a willingness to fight and die for what he believed was right. ’Pac … triggered the perception of myself as a coward. I hated that I wasn’t what he was in the world, and I suffered a raging jealousy: I wanted Jada to look at me like that.”
Those revelations have now separated his image from that of the more discreet Black acting titans like Poitier, Denzel Washington, and Harry Belafonte, Black Hollywood’s dignified elder statesmen, who Smith had begun to share lofty company with. (In a move that should not surprise anyone, the Smiths will apparently unpack the Oscars incident on Red Table Talk.)
In December of last year, while promoting King Richard and his memoir, Smith told the New York Times about this shift in his image and hinted at the long-held ways he’d attempted to frame himself, even down to the way he used to walk eight years ago. “I’m trying to create a joyful persona, and it’s because a long time ago I realized how you enter a space is going to determine how the space reacts to you. So my walk is joyful, but it’s also somewhat performative and preemptive. It’s like, I don’t want somebody to feel like they have to punch me in my face. I want to walk into a room and get as many friends as quickly as possible.” Now, though, things have changed. “At this point in my life, I’m comfortable in my body. I’m OK with things not being perfect. I don’t have to look right. My mind isn’t drifting to what people are thinking when I walk in anymore. It’s much less performative and conscious.” Echoing that statement, he continued to differentiate himself then and now: “Strategizing about being the biggest movie star in the world — that is all completely over. I realized that in order to enjoy my time here and in order to be helpful, it’s much more about self-examination. I want to take roles where I get to look at myself, where I get to look at my family, I get to look at ideas that are important to me.”
