The actor who changed Will Smith’s life: “There was no question, that’s the one”
Looking back over Will Smith’s 30-year acting career, it’s clear that the A-list star has collaborated with countless Hollywood greats. In his early days, he learned from seasoned veterans, while today, he often takes on the role of mentor to the next generation of talent. Over the years, Smith has worked with almost everyone worth knowing in the industry. Yet, fascinatingly, he claims that only one actor truly changed his life—and it’s not who you might expect.
Firstly, let’s go through some potential candidates for being the star who altered the trajectory of Smith’s life. In only his third film, Six Degrees of Separation, Smith worked with luminaries like Donald Sutherland, Ian McKellan, and Stockard Channing. Smith revealed in his memoir that he experimented with method acting on this project but realised it wasn’t for him because he fell in love with Channing, just like his character in the movie.
He told Esquire: “So, the movie was over, and I went home, and I was dying to see Stockard. I was like, ‘Oh no! What have I done?'” Despite making googly eyes over the Grease star, though, Channing wasn’t the actor who changed his life.
The next obvious candidate is Martin Lawrence, who helped Smith land the role of Mike Lowry in 1995’s Bad Boys. The film cemented Smith’s status as a movie star, and the pair have made three sequels together. In 2024, Smith recalled meeting Lawrence for the first time, saying, “It was definitely love at first sight…Martin actually brought me into Bad Boys and from the first time we sat and we talked, the chemistry was just magic.” However, once again, Lawrence isn’t the guy who changed Smith’s life.
Instead, the actor with whom Smith formed a creative relationship that “totally transformed” his life was none other than Alfonso Ribeiro. That’s right—cousin Carlton Banks from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
Ribeiro is a cult legend for his performance as the nerdy Carlton in that classic 1990s sitcom, but it’s unlikely many of Smith’s fans would have pegged him for having such an important role in Smith’s path to superstardom. However, Smith told Vice TV’s Black Comedy in America that meeting Ribeiro was one of those magical times when “you meet somebody who understands you in a way that other people don’t understand you.” He credited Ribeiro with an ability to “craft things for you to create and shine and explode.”
For Smith, perhaps the most eye-opening thing about Ribeiro was that he was never afraid to go out on the “comedic limb” to get a laugh. Smith marvelled: “When he came in for the audition, there was like no question, that’s the one. Nobody commits as hard as Alf.” He explained that Ribeiro would commit to trying a joke with everything he had, even if he knew it was a risky gag and he had the potential to fall flat on his face. From this, Smith learned, “The willingness to crash and burn is the only way you can be funny.”
Fascinatingly, though, Smith revealed that Ribeiro told him there was another reason he put everything into any joke in a given script. In his opinion, “You commit so the writers can know it doesn’t work.” This is a unique philosophy that not many comedic talents have articulated before, but it makes perfect sense when you think about it. After all, if an actor does everything in their power to make a line of dialogue funny and it’s still not landing correctly, the writer may realise the need to go back to the drawing board.
