Jerry Seinfeld asked Chris Rock to recreate the Will Smith Oscars slap for his Netflix movie. Rock turned him down.
John P. Johnson / Netflix / Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images
- Jerry Seinfeld tried to get Chris Rock to recreate the moment Will Smith slapped him.
- Seinfeld told a podcast he tried to involve Rock not long after the slap for his movie "Unfrosted."
- Rock declined the role because he was still "a little shook," Seinfeld said.
Jerry Seinfeld said he wanted Chris Rock to recreate the moment Will Smith slapped him on the Oscar stage for his new movie "Unfrosted."
In 2022, Smith walked onstage during the Oscars ceremony and slapped Rock after the comedian joked about the Smith's wife's bald head.
Smith later apologized publicly and was banned from attending the Oscars for 10 years.
The slap quickly became a major pop-culture moment and has been used as fodder for comedians since.
Seinfeld asked Rock to parody this moment in "Unfrosted," a request he described while speaking on the "Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade" podcast.
In the scene, Rock, Seinfeld's longtime friend, would cameo as an MC at the fictional Bowl and Spoon awards show.
"We shot that right after the Will Smith slap, and I was going to have somebody come up on the stage and have Chris punch him out as they got there," Seinfeld said.
Rock wasn't on board though. In the end, they cast Cedric the Entertainer as the MC instead and removed the slapping part.
"He was still a little shook from that event," Seinfeld said of Rock, before asking the podcast's hosts whether the joke would have been funny.
"Without the Will Smith thing, I think it's funny. There's still kind of a residual darkness around that moment," Carvey said.
"Isn't that what we're attracted to? The residual darkness," Seinfeld replied. "I don't know if it would have worked. It was an idea."
In Rock's first stand-up show, a few days after the Oscar slap in 2022, the comedian said he was "still processing what happened" and wasn't ready to make jokes.
However, the incident did help his popularity as ticket sales soared for his 2022 comedy show on the back of the moment.
Rock didn't address the incident fully until his Netflix special, "Selective Outrage" in March 2023 where he made further jokes about Smith and his wife Jada Pinkett-Smith.
Despite its star-studded cast, "Unfrosted" has underperformed critically and commercially. The film scored 39% on Rotten Tomatoes, with one critic describing it as "one of the worst films of the decade."
Though "Unfrosted" reached the No. 1 spot on Netflix's film charts in its first week, Forbes reported that the movie only had 7.1 million views, only around a third of the audience of a usual top-spot debut.