The Fresh Prince of Bel Air reunion airs today on HBO Max and during the reunion, Will Smith and Janet Hubert hashed out their differences. According to Showbiz Cheat Sheet, Hubert — who played Aunt Viv, revealed that she had issues in her personal life, she was pregnant and in an abusive marriage and it affected her work on the set.
She told Will, “When I left the show, I had this new baby and no one. Family disowned me. Hollywood disowned me. My family said, ‘You’ve ruined our name.’ And, I wasn’t unprofessional on the set. I just stopped talking to everybody because I didn’t know who to trust because I’d been banished. They said it was you who banished me because you were Will. You were a kid. It was hard.”
Will apologized and then responded, “During that time, her pregnancy, I wasn’t sensitive. I wasn’t perceptive and now that I’ve had three kids, I’ve learned some things that I did not know at the time and I would do things very differently. But I can see where I made the set very difficult for Janet. I was 21 years old. Everything was a threat to me. Not you, the world. I was so driven by fear and jokes and comedy and all of that. Now I have children. I’ve been divorced and have a second marriage. I can see now the level of pain and the level of struggle that it was for you just to show up every day.”