When Will Smith walked onto the stage at the 2022 Academy Awards and slapped Chris Rock for making a joke about his wife, he all but established that the two of them would be linked to one another for the rest of their lives. Rock’s angry response to the incident in his 2023 stand-up special, Selective Outrage, certainly didn’t provide us with any reasons to not mention the pair in the same sentence, nor did it serve to ease the tensions between them. But as hard as it may be to believe now, there was actually a time when Smith and Rock were on pretty friendly terms. The two even collaborated on a couple of occasions.
The first time they crossed paths—on-screen, at least—was during a September 25, 1995, episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air titled “Get a Job.” Will and his cousin, Carlton (played by Alfonso Ribeiro), are both in the running for a talent coordinator job in the episode, which Will ends up getting. In one scene, Rock plays a comedian named Maurice Perry, who Carlton describes as a “low-rent Martin Lawrence wannabe.” As Will and Carlton bicker about the gig in front of Rock’s character, Carlton tells Will, “The better man won.” Will then threatens his cousin while Rock watches on nearby, telling him, “The bigger, badder man’s about to beat the better man into oblivion”:
Later in the show, Will is asked to take Maurice’s sister out on a date as part of his duties. He’s initially excited to do it until he gets his first glimpse of her. You see, the sister, as it turns out, looks just like Rock in drag, which might have something to do with the fact that she’s also played by Rock, this time sporting a curly blonde wig and a leopard print dress. What follows is a montage of the two at a nightclub, where Rock’s character tries to grind up on Will on the dance floor, and at one point, attempts to kiss him:
Smith and Rock reunited in 1997 for the HBO animated series Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child. In the Season 2 episode “Pinocchio,” Smith voices the titular wooden puppet from The Adventures of Pinocchio, who belongs to an African-American prospector named Old George in this version. In place of Jiminy Cricket, this adaptation introduces us to Woody the Termite, as portrayed by Rock. Further animated projects featuring Rock, of course, include the Madagascar films, which he starred in alongside Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, starting in 2005.
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