Bel-Air, Peacock’s reimagined version of The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air, ended on Monday night (December 8) – and Will Smith made a surprise cameo. Watch the touching moment here.
A number of actors from the original series have appeared in Bel-Air over its four-season run, with Daphne Maxwell Reid, who played the second Aunt Viv, Vernee Watson-Johnson, who played Will’s mother Vy, and Tyra Banks, who played Will’s ex-girlfriend Jackie Ames, among them.
The series hoped to get as many stars from the original series on board as possible, but a few – most notably Alfonso Ribeiro, Karyn Parsons, and DJ Jazzy Jeff – didn’t feature. And, until the final moments of Monday’s finale, Smith, who’s one of the show’s executive producers, was also thought to be in that group.
In the episode, he appears alongside Bel-Air’s new Will Smith, played by Jabari Banks. He plays the character of Will in the future, offering advice to his past self.
Will, his cousin Carlton (Olly Sholotan) and his friend Jazz (Jordan L. Jones) drive to an area where you can see a lot of the city as Will prepares to head to the University of Pennsylvania in his hometown of Philadelphia.
He asks Carlton and Jazz for a minute alone, when a stranger appears, sporting sunglasses. “Steppin’ into the future is kinda scary, huh?” he asks Will, before removing them so the audience can see that it’s Smith himself.
“Nah, I’m cool,” says the younger Will, before Smith replies, “It’s OK, I won’t tell your boys.” They then have a conversation, with young Will opening up about his anxieties around going home and future Will telling him his feelings are natural, and that nobody has got everything all figured out.
Young Will says, “I don’t know, it sounds like you’ve got it all figured out, OG,” before future Will replies: “Oh no, no, sir. Trust me, you’re going to mess some things up and do some dumb shit. But, you’re human. You’ll learn, you’ll grow.”
However, writer, showrunner and executive producer Carla Banks Waddles admitted last week that Smith’s appearance almost didn’t happen.
“When we pitched the season out early from the writers’ room, he was a part of it,” she said (via Deadline). “We were like, ‘This is the season. We want him in the finale, and we know he wants to do the show. We’ve always wanted him on the show, and now’s the time, because there’s no more show after this.’ But we didn’t know if it would happen because of his schedule and everything.”
She went on: “We found out about two weeks before that he’s going to be able to get back to the States and do it. As you can imagine, he’s got an uber-busy schedule. We had days when we had given up hope, and others where we were like, could it be? I’m just glad that it worked out.”
Smith, meanwhile, has been working on the Netflix movie Fast And Loose. It was due to be directed by Michael Bay, who previously worked with Smith on his 1995 film Bad Boys and the 2003 sequel Bad Boys II, but he left his position earlier this year, reportedly due to creative differences. Deadline later reported that King Ivory director John Swab would be taking over.
The movie is thought to focus on a man who wakes up in the Mexican city of Tijuana with no memory, and has to put his life as a crime kingpin and undercover CIA back together.
Bad Boys producer Jerry Bruckheimer is working on the movie alongside Chad Oman and Smith himself, through the Westbrook film company he runs with wife Jada Pinkett Smith.
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