Will Smith admits in his new memoir that he briefly possessed thoughts of killing his father as a way to “avenge” the years of vicious beatings the patriarch gave his mother.
Excerpts of the upcoming book Me, which is due out on Nov. 9, 2021, have been obtained by People magazine. The Men in Black and Bad Boys franchise star writes about the relationship between his father, Willard Carroll Smith Sr., and mother Caroline Bright, and his childhood that was often fraught with violence.
“My father was violent, but he was also at every game, play, and recital,” Smith, 53, writes. “He was an alcoholic, but he was sober at every premiere of every one of my movies. He listened to every record. He visited every studio.”
Smith continues: “When I was nine years old, I watched my father punch my mother in the side of the head so hard that she collapsed. I saw her spit blood.”
Tired of the domestic abuse, Smith’s mother separated from his father when he was a teen and they divorced in 2000.
With decades of anger brewing beneath the surface, Smith wrote that he briefly could have gotten revenge on his ailing father who eventually died in 2016.
“One night, as I delicately wheeled him from his bedroom toward the bathroom, a darkness arose within me. The path between the two rooms goes past the top of the stairs. As a child I’d always told myself that I would one day avenge my mother.
“I paused at the top of the stairs. I could shove him down, and easily get away with it. As the decades of pain, anger, and resentment coursed then receded, I shook my head and proceeded to wheel Daddio to the bathroom.”
