The one and only actor Will Smith has always been jealous of: “How do I beat him?”
Up until he slapped Chris Rock across the chops in front of his peers and an audience of millions, Will Smith didn’t really have anything to worry about in terms of maintaining his position as one of the biggest movie stars of the modern era.
While there were occasional missteps along the way, he’d held onto his spot since the mid-1990s, and all it took for him to relinquish it was to do the stupidest thing imaginable on the most important night of his career, and watching him return to the stage shortly afterward to collect his ‘Best Actor’ prize for King Richard has a good shot at being named the single most awkward moment in Oscars history.
That was supposed to be the icing on the cake, too; there’s always been a clear distinction between actors and movie stars, and most of the people who’d spent the bulk of their time in Hollywood occupying the latter camp didn’t win Academy Awards. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Harrison Ford, and Jim Carrey all matched Smith at one time or another in earning power, but never won the big one, or were even nominated.
He’s the only actor in history to headline nine consecutive films that earned at least $100million at the domestic box office, and between 1996’s Independence Day and 2019’s Aladdin, 16 of his 24 features earned at least a quarter of a billion dollars in ticket sales. Needless to say, stars didn’t come much bigger, so what did he have to be jealous of? One man, and one man only.
“I had been given the Holy Grail of movie stardom,” he wrote in his memoir, Will. “I scanned the field of my competition to see who else knew, who else held the secret… and Tom Cruise was at the head of the pack.” To be fair, if there was one person in the business you could call more famous than Smith at the peak of his powers, it was Cruise, and Cruise alone.
“I started quietly monitoring all of Tom’s global promotional activities,” he continued. “When I arrived in a country to promote my movie, I would ask the local movie executives to give me Tom’s promotional schedule. And I vowed to do two hours more than whatever he did in every country. Unfortunately, Tom Cruise is either a cyborg, or there are six of him.”
Even he couldn’t keep up with the megawatt grin of cinema’s most prominent Scientologist, with Smith admitting that “Tom Cruise’s global promotions were the individual best in Hollywood,” which left him in a bit of a sticky wicket. “How could I beat him?” he pondered. “What do I have that he doesn’t have?”
The answer was music. Nobody’s going to call Smith the greatest rapper of all time, but he did have a secondary career that his nemesis didn’t. Cruise might have been able to sign every autograph and pound the promotional treadmill like a tiny little Terminator, but he didn’t record bespoke theme songs for his movies, did he? The former Fresh Prince did, and nobody better suggest that ‘Wild Wild West’, ‘Men in Black’, and ‘Black Suits Comin’ (Nod Ya Head)’ don’t hold up.
Cruise recovered from his couch-jumping antics to reclaim his throne, but only time will tell if Smith can do the same after his Oscars indiscretion.
