Will Smith’s post-Oscars non secular journey has taken him again to his outdated high school.
The King Richard actor — famously “West Philadelphia, born and raised” — visited Overbrook High School within the metropolis on Thursday. He popped in, with a videographer in tow, to talk to college students in a digital media class on the public school. The college students screamed when he walked in, video confirmed. It was a second.
In addition to his remarks, the 54-year-old Oscar winner posed for a gaggle photograph with college students and likewise cheesed for some selfies. He additionally checked out an outdated yearbook, with the photograph of 1 “Willard Smith” in it, and interacted. Outside the school, he additionally greeted shocked college students, taking selfies with them, shaking arms and giving hugs.
The school district shared video and photographs on social media, writing, “Thanks for everything Will!” The publish led to many constructive feedback from folks saying they had been previous classmates with Smith — or college students at that school who had met him on his earlier journeys again. (Some earlier college students talked in regards to the time Smith took a few of the high college students to Africa to satisfy Nelson Mandela.) This can also be the web we’re speaking about, so there was additionally a vigorous debate within the feedback about Smith’s actions on the Academy Awards in March.
Oscars night time, after all, was when Smith stormed the stage and hit presenter Chris Rock after the comic made a G.I. Jane joke about Jada Pinkett Smith. Smith stated he was defending his spouse, who has alopecia; Rock was apparently unaware there was a medical cause behind the Red Table Talk co-host’s bald head. Smith went on to win the Best Actor Oscar after the slap, however resigned from the Academy after. He’s been banned from attending the Oscars for 10 years.
In the wake of the scandal, Smith embarked on a “spiritual journey” to India for yoga and meditation. He’s stayed off the pink carpet and has saved his social media mild with movies of spiders, bathrooms and such.
Smith’s first movie for the reason that scandal — the Antoine Fuqua-directed Emancipation — comes out Dec. 2. It’s about an enslaved man named escaping from a Louisiana plantation — and, in mild of the scandal, Smith has been developing his personal press tour to advertise the challenge. So far as a substitute of plenty of media interviews and splashy appearances, giving folks Big Willie-style laughs, he’s attending a sequence of personal screenings of the movie. Last month, he attended a screening in Washington, D.C., on the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s 51st annual Legislative Conference, hosted by the NAACP. In current days, he joined Tyler Perry to point out the movie at Morehouse College in Atlanta and simply earlier than he did the identical at one other traditionally Black faculty, Dillard University. He additionally had a personal screening for the L.A. Lakers and one other for an A-list group of his well-known pals, together with Rihanna and Dave Chappelle.
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