Gayle King is Oprah‘s bestie, so if anyone was going to have the temerity to ask Serena Williams about the Slap Heard Round the World, it was King. And King got right after it, bringing into stark relief the fact that Williams hadn’t yet made any comment on Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars last year.
Why should Serena Williams have something to say about the slap? Because Smith’s open-handed attack on live television was a violent act that regrettably diluted the celebration of his acting — acting that saw Smith portray Williams’s father Richard in the biopic King Richard, by consensus an uncanny portrayal of the tennis family patriarch.
Williams and her sisters had executive-produced the film, which Smith’s impulsive act put a damper on.
So what did Serena Williams think about it all?
“I thought (King Richard) was such an incredible film, and I feel that there was an incredible film after that with Questlove (Summer of Soul) that got overshadowed,” Williams said of how the infamous Oscars night went down.
“But I also feel that I’ve been in a position,” she said, “where I’ve been under a lot of pressure and I’ve made a tremendous amount of mistakes. And I’m the kind of person that’s like ― ‘I’ve been there. I’ve made a mistake. It’s not the end of the world.’”
