Will Smith Had a 'Vision' of Losing His Career Before That Oscars Slap

After slapping comedian Chris Rock on stage at the Oscars this year, Will Smith has been banned by the Academy from future ceremonies for the next decade. The backlash against his behavior has also resulted in several of his projects being canned.

Prior to the slap, Smith was on a real roll, having chronicled his weight loss journey in the YouTube series Best Shape of My Life and published his memoir WILL. Then there was his Best Actor win at the Academy Awards for his performance in King Richard—an accolade that was unavoidably overshadowed by events earlier that night.

Uncannily, Smith may have actually predicted the fallout from the slap before it even happened. Prior to the Oscars, Smith sat down for an interview on David Letterman's Netflix show My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, and spoke about his fear of losing everything he has built. The episode only just dropped on the streaming platform, meaning everybody watching it is doing so from a completely different context.

During their conversation, Smith told Letterman about taking ayahuasca while in Peru, and how he had a psychotropic "vision" where his money, career, and home were all gone.

"You're not hallucinating, right, it's like both realities are 100 percent present," he said. "It's not superimposed over this reality. It's totally separate. There's what's going on in your head, and what's going on in the room."

He went on to describe one trip in particular as the "individual most hellish psychological experience" of his life: "I'm sitting there, and you're always like, maybe it won't kick in this time. So I'm drinking, I'm sitting there, and then all of a sudden it's like, I start seeing all of my money flying away and my house is flying away, and my career is gone. And I'm trying to grab for my money and my career. My whole life is getting destroyed... and I hear a voice saying, this is what the fuck it is. This is what the fuck life is."

In this hallucination, Smith could hear his daughter, singer Willow Smith, calling for help, and he told Letterman that he imagined letting go of all of his material concerns in order to get to her.

"When I came out of it, I realized that anything that happens in my life, I can handle it," he said. "I can handle any person I lose, I can handle anything that goes wrong in my life, I can handle anything in my marriage, I can handle anything that this life has to offer me."

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