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Three seasons into The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Will Smith started focusing on his movie career. He’d done Where the Day Takes You and Made in America, but 1993’s Six Degrees of Separation was his chance to show he was a serious actor. He succeeded a little too well. Smith admits when he came back to shoot The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air Season 4, he wasn’t funny anymore.

'The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air': Alfonso Ribeiro stands while Will Smith and Karyn Parsons sit on the sofa
L-R: Alfonso Ribeiro, Will Smith, Karyn Parsons | Paul Drinkwater/NBCU Photo Bank

Smith writes about Six Degrees of Separation and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in his new autobiography, Will. He explains how the movie compromised his humor, and how he got it back. 

The Will Smith movie ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ 

In Six Degrees of Separation, Smith plays a con artist who ingratiates himself with a wealthy family by pretending to be Sidney Poitier’s son. Smith wrote that when he came back to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, he was still putting on Poitier airs. 

“‘The w is before the h. It’s not hwat, Will,’ Alfonso [Ribeiro] said frustratedly,” he wrote. “I had lost touch with the Fresh Prince. I couldn’t remember how he walked or talked or which Jordans he preferred. This went on for ten full episodes at the beginning of season 4. I had lost my sense of humor, my timing, my swag, my charisma, and my ability to improvise and ad-lib.”

Will Smith ‘couldn’t tell a joke to save my life’

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air would show outtakes during the end credits. The audience at home could see just how funny Smith was between takes. After Six Degrees of Separation though, Smith said he lost it. 

“I couldn’t tell a joke to save my life,” he wrote. “The scary part was that I couldn’t see what everybody else saw. But if enough people tell you that you’re drunk, then you should probably sit down. So, I immediately hired five or six of my friends from Philly to work on the writing staff, on the crew, and to surround me on set while I relearned how to play the character of ‘Will.’”

Fortunately, comedy came back to Smith and the show lasted through season 6. He even made up this classic Fresh Prince of Bel-Air line.

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“It worked,” he wrote. “Right around mid-season, something clicked. I was in a scene with Karyn, and my character was trying to convince her to go on a date with his teacher, but he had a mole next to his left nostril. And for Hilary, this was an absolute deal breaker. My character was begging her to just give him a chance, and in a moment of career-saving comedic inspiration, I ad-libbed, ‘Come on, you’re making a mountain out of a mole, Hil.’”

‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’ cast took the spotlight for 10 episodes

The silver lining of Smith’s crisis of comedy was that it gave The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air cast a moment to shine. For 10 episodes, Carlton (Ribeiro) got more storylines. 

“This was the season that Alfonso truly began to shine,” he wrote. “For the first few episodes the writers had to write away from my character and toward Carlton. Alfonso stepped up and took the comedic weight. No one knew what was happening, no one was relating my behavior on the set of Fresh Prince to my ill-conceived foray into the dangerous psychological world of method acting in Six Degrees.”

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is now streaming on HBO Max.

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