Oscars producer Will Packer said he didn’t realize presenter Chris Rock had been physically struck by Will Smith until he heard it straight from the comedian’s mouth.
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“I thought it was a bit, like everybody else,” Packer told Good Morning America in his first public comments since Sunday night’s shocker. Smith, shortly before winning the Oscar for Best Actor, slapped Rock over a joke he made about the shaved head of Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. She has publicly talked of her struggle with alopecia, a condition which causes hair loss.
Watch the full interview above.
Packer told correspondent T.J. Holmes that he was watching from just offstage as Rock launched into his mini-set before handing out the Best Documentary prize. “He didn’t tell one planned joke,” Packer said. “I thought this was something that Chris and Will were doing on their own. I thought it was a bit. … We hadn’t practiced it.”
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Once it started to become clear what was unfolding, Packer said, “My heart dropped. I remember thinking, ‘Oh no. Not like this.’ … I’ve never felt as immediately devastated as I did in that moment.”
Holmes pressed Packer about the optics of letting Smith continue on, basking in a standing ovation. “The people in that room who stood up stood up for somebody that they knew — he was a peer, a friend, a brother,” he said. “He has a three-decades-plus career of being the opposite of what we saw in that moment. These people saw the person that they know and they were hoping that somehow, some way, this was an aberration.”
The fact that Smith neglected to apologize to Rock is regrettable, Packer agreed. “If he wasn’t going to give that speech which made it truly better, then yes” it would have been better had Smith not stayed. “Because then you don’t have the optics of somebody who committed this act, didn’t nail it in terms of a conciliatory acceptance speech in that moment, who continued to be in that room.”
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After Rock came offstage, Packer said he asked him, “Did he really hit you? And he looks at me and goes, ‘Yeah. I just took a punch from Muhammad Ali. He was right away in joke mode, but you could tell that he was in complete shock.”
The Academy has taken heat for allowing Smith to not only remain in the theater, but to go onstage and give a rambling, teary acceptance speech. Packer insisted that the decision not to have Smith escorted out of the Dolby Theater was made by Rock. The comedian strongly expressed a preference that Will Smith not be arrested by police, according to Packer.
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“They were about to physically remove Will Smith,” he said. “I wasn’t part of those conversations. …Rock has made it clear that he didn’t want to make a bad situation worse.”
The Academy’s Board of Governors is investigating the incident and plans to discuss potential sanctions for Smith at a meeting later this month.
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