Will Smith confesses that he contemplated killing his father for the violence he exercised against his mother | People

Will Smith has opened up on the channel and has revealed to the world for the first time the secrets of the troubled relationship he has had with his parents in a memoir that bears his name, Will, and which will be published in the United States on November 9 (and will arrive in Spain on December 1 from the Planeta publishing house). In them, the actor is sincere about numerous personal issues, although one of the main pillars revolves around his own family, formed by his father, William Carroll Smith – who died in 2016 due to cancer – and his mother, Caroline Bright , who raised him along with his other three siblings in Philadelphia (USA). Magazine People has unveiled an exclusive excerpt in which Smith, 53, talks about one of the traumatic incidents that he experienced in childhood and that involved his father, leaving him a wound that remained open for years.

“My father was violent, but he was also in every play and recital he gave. He was an alcoholic, but he was sober at the premieres of each of my films, ”he recounts in the first pages of his book. “He listened to every record. Visited all studios [de grabación]. The same intense perfectionism that terrified his family was why he managed to put food on the table every night of my life “, confesses the interpreter of The prince of Bel Air and I’m legend. The most traumatic moment for him took place during a terrifying act of violence that he witnessed and in which his father physically attacked his mother: “When I was nine years old, I saw my father hit my mother on the side of the head so hard that he collapsed. I saw her spit blood. That moment in that room, probably more than any other moment in my life, has defined who I am. “

The extent of the impact of that moment came to influence his career. “In everything I’ve done since then, the awards and the accolades, the spotlights and the attention, the characters and the laughs, there has been a subtle chain of apologies to my mother for not performing that day. For failing him at that moment. For not standing up to my father. For being a coward ”, the actor is sincere, who recognizes that over the years that bitter memory has not left his thoughts. He assures that “what has come to be understood as ‘Will Smith’, the biggest movie star, is largely a construction, a carefully crafted and perfected character” that he himself has designed to protect himself. “To hide from the world. To hide the coward ”, he stated.

Smith’s parents separated when he was a teenager and ended up divorcing in the year 2000. Despite maintaining a close relationship with his father, the actor writes that the anger caused by that past incident kept resurfacing in him over and over again. time, decades later. That contained anger assailed him for years, especially while taking care of his father after being diagnosed with cancer, when the doctors gave him six weeks to live, as he declared in 2016. “One night, while I was taking him from his bedroom to the I bathe carefully, a darkness arose within me. The path between these two rooms passes at the top of the stairs. When I was a child, I always told myself that one day I would avenge my mother. That when he was old enough, when he was strong enough, when he was no longer a coward, he would kill him ”, he confessed, showing that the resentment for what his father did haunted him for years.

It was that moment in which Will Smith remembers having wanted to kill his father. “I stopped at the top of the stairs. I thought I could push it and get rid of it easily, “said the actor. “As the decades of pain, anger and resentment were fading, I shook my head and proceeded to take him to the bathroom,” he said.

After the death of his father, Smith reflected on the complex relationship they had maintained over the years and what it had taught him. “There is nothing you can receive from the material world that generates inner peace or satisfaction,” he reflected in his book, after finishing the story that was installed for so long on his shoulders. “In the end, it doesn’t matter one iota how much other people have loved you, you will only achieve happiness based on how well you have loved them.”

Will Smith is married to Jada Pinkett, with whom he has been in an open relationship for 23 years and with whom he shares two children: Jaden and Willow. In addition, she has another child from a first marriage, Trey, 29, with whom she has a difficult relationship. It was at the end of September when he revealed during an interview for the magazine GQ that another of the topics that he would deal with in his memoirs would be the comings and goings that he has experienced within his marriage. Specifically, the book includes the details of an explosive fight that the two had after celebrating Pinkett’s 40th birthday, which broke out after discussing the concept that each of them had about the couple.