Oscars Producer Says Chris Rock Advocated for Will Smith to Stay at the Oscars

Will Packer is sharing new details about the 2022 Oscars.

The Oscars producer made an appearance on Good Morning America on Friday (April 1), where he discussed the confrontation between Chris Rock and Will Smith.

Click inside to read more…

Will shared that he initially thought the moment where Will Smith slapped Chris was a bit. “I thought it was part of something that Chris and Will were doing on their own,” he said. “I thought it was a bit. I wasn’t concerned at all.”

He also confirmed that the comedian was “freestyling” when he made the joke about Jada Pinkett Smith and his comments were not scripted. Will said “he had an amazing lineup of jokes that we had. We had him in the prompter and ultimately he did not get to one joke. He didn’t tell one of the planned jokes.”

After the slap happened, Will went up to Chris backstage. “I said did he really hit you?” the producer asked the comedian. “And he looked at me and he goes, ‘Yeah, I just took a punch from Muhammad Ali,’ as only Chris can. He was immediately in joke mode, but you could tell that he was very much still in shock.”

“I knew it was clearly a confrontational moment because of what was happening from Will in the audience, but I still wasn’t sure that he actually struck him,” he continued. “I made that clear, like, Rock, you tell me, whatever you want to do, brother, and he was telling me, I’m fine.”

Will said he didn’t speak with the King Richard actor after it happened, but approached Academy leadership at the show to convey that Chris didn’t want him removed.

He said “That was Chris’ energy. His tone was not retaliatory, it was not angry, so I was advocating what Rock wanted in that time which was not to physically remove Will Smith at that time because as it has now been explained to me, that was the only option at that point.”

The producer also defended those who gave Will a standing ovation after he won the Oscar.

“It wasn’t like this was somebody they didn’t know,” he said. “It doesn’t make anything that he did right and doesn’t excuse that behavior at all but I think that the people in that room who stood up for somebody who they knew, right, who was a peer, who was a friend, who was a brother, who has a three decades-plus long career of being the opposite of what we saw in that moment. I think these people saw the person that they know and were hoping that somehow, someway, this was an aberration…I don’t think that these were people that were applauding anything at all about that moment.”

As for whether he thought Will should’ve left, “I think what many of us were hoping was that he would go on that stage and make it better,” he said. “It couldn’t be made right in that moment, because of what had happened but I think we were hoping that he would make it better, that he would stand on that stage and say what just happened minutes ago was absolutely and completely wrong [and say], ‘Chris Rock, I’m so sorry, please forgive me.’ That’s what I was hoping for. I felt like he was going to win and I was hoping that if he stayed he said that.”

Later in the interview, Will revealed that the LAPD were ready to arrest the actor. Find out why they never did…