At the 2022 Oscars, Will Smith punched out Chris Rock after he made a joke about his wife Jada Pinkett Smith’s baldness. What disease does she suffer from?
[Mis à jour le 28 mars 2022 à 17h44] While she was in front of the stage of the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles to attend the ceremony of Oscars 2022, Jada Pinkett-Smith found herself at the heart of the most striking sequence of the great evening of cinema. Indeed, while comedian Chris Rock was on stage to present the award for best documentary film, he made a joke directly targeting Jada Pinkett-Smith. Her husband, Will Smith, then got up and went on stage to slap Chris Rock. Seconds later, Smith yelled, “Keep my wife’s name out of your fucking mouth!” The sequence, described by many as a simple “incident”, has been widely commented on.
If Chris Rock’s joke shocked Will Smith so much, it’s probably because it was attacking his wife’s illness. Indeed, in 2018, Jada Pinkett Smith revealed to suffer from alopecia. This disease causes the acceleration of the loss of hair and hair, and pushed the actress to completely shave her head. It is not a fatal disease, but it is indeed an autoimmune disease of the nervous system, a frequent source of baldness in women. Since then, the actress appears regularly on the red carpets proudly displaying her shaved head. Yet it is on this subject that Chris Rock decided to joke during the Oscars ceremony, which did not please Will Smith at all.
Jada Pinkett Smith decided to share her journey with alopecia on social media. On Instagram, she recently explained that she had discovered a line of hair lost above her head and explained how she was going to try to hide it. “Mom is going to put rhinestones on top, it will make me a little crown”. The fact of expressing oneself so freely about this disease also makes it possible to open a dialogue on this subject. Indeed, Jada Pinkett Smith is far from being the only woman to fight against alopecia. A 2016 study giving the floor to nearly 5,600 black women found that 47.6% of them experienced hair loss.
While the Hollywood elite gathered at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles on March 27, 2022, several presenters presented the Academy Awards. Called to present the statuette for best documentary film, comedian Chris Rock allowed himself to chain several jokes. He notably targeted actress Jada Pinkett Smith, claiming to be eager to see her in the sequel to Equal Arms, a film where Demi Moore has a shaved head. At this moment of the ceremony, we can clearly see Jada Pinkett Smith rolling her eyes, no doubt tired of this reference to her baldness. A few seconds later, Will Smith gets up from his seat and goes to slap Chris Rock.
Jada Pinkett Smith is an American actress, producer and singer born September 18, 1971 in Baltimore. In her youth, she joined the Baltimore School of Arts and then joined a theater school in North Carolina where she studied for a year before embarking on an acting career. It was first on television that Jada Pinkett Smith made her debut as an actress. We see her briefly in the series 21 Jump Street and Doctor Doogie before she landed her first regular role in Campus Show where she played from 1991 to 1993. The cinema then opened its doors to her, she played in Menace II Society and The Inkwell in 1993 and 1994.
In the 2000s, Jada Pinkett Smith will participate in what is undoubtedly her most famous feat in Hollywood: the Matrix trilogy. She plays the role of Captain Niobé alongside Keanu Reeves’ Neo in the Wachowski sisters’ Science Fiction saga. She will also resume this role in 2021 in Matrix Resurrections, the fourth installment in the saga. In 2001 and 2004, she played twice for Michael Mann, in Ali then in Collateral. On television, she played the main role of the series Hawthorne, head nurse for three seasons from 2009 to 2011.
If Jada Pinkett Smith made a little less appearances in the cinema in the 2010s, we still see her in Magic Mike XXL but also in Bad Moms opposite Mila Kunis. She also participates regularly in the series Gotham, which is interested in the young years of Bruce Wayne before he became Batman, in which she plays the role of a mobster named Fish Mooney from 2014 to 2017. In 2021, she serves as a producer for the film The Williams Method, which will earn her husband Will Smith the Oscar for best actor in 2022.
Jada Pinkett Smith formed a couple with Will Smith in 1997. The two actors met in 1994 when the actress auditioned for the role of Smith’s girlfriend in the Prince of Bel-Air series. If Jada Pinkett is not retained, they bind from this moment strong bonds of friendship. They dated from 1997 and got married the same year. Their son, Jaden Smith, was born in 1998, followed by their daughter Willow Smith in 2000.
Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith have been a couple since 1997. However, this relationship has had its ups and downs. Today, the couple still holds but it is also thanks to the many compromises that they were able to agree to one and the other. In an interview with GQ in September 2021, Will Smith explained that they had both “had endless important discussions about what relationship perfection is.” After spending a lot of time monogamous, the Pinkett-Smith couple is now more free. “We gave each other confidence and freedom, with the conviction that everyone must find their own way” explained the actor before continuing: “Jada never believed in conventional marriage”, specifying in particular that his wife “had members of his family who lived in unconventional relationships”. And to conclude that, according to him, “marriage cannot be a prison”.
In a book published in November 2021, Will Smith continued his revelations about his union with Jada Pinkett-Smith. He explained in particular that the couple had to reassess their romance. “Our marriage wasn’t working. We couldn’t pretend anymore. We were both unhappy and clearly something had to change” in their approach to marriage and especially about monogamy. However, the actor specified not to advise this to everyone, quite the contrary. “I’m not suggesting this route to anyone. But the experiences that the freedoms we’ve given each other and the unconditional support, to me, are the highest definition of love.”