Isabelle Adjani, soon to star in François Ozon’s new film Peter von Kant, came back, in an interview with the site Three colours, on Will Smith’s inappropriate gesture at the Oscars ceremony last March. He then slapped comedian Chris Rock after he made fun of his wife Jada Pinkett Smith’s alopecia.
Initially, the 66-year-old actress, radiant last May at the Cannes Film Festival, was asked about the hasty departure of Adèle Haenel during the Césars ceremony in 2020, at the announcement of a prize awarded to Roman Polanski, when he was accused of rape. As a reminder, she had accused a few months earlier the director Christophe Ruggia of having harassed her and of having sexually abused her from her 12 to her 15 years.
“I took it for what it was, a moment without artifice” reacted Isabelle Adjani, before establishing a link between this sequence and that of the American actor at the Oscars. “It’s not going to be politically correct to say that, but it’s like Will Smith’s gesture. I don’t take it badly either. This gesture of Adèle Haenel, I did not experience it as an exclusion of Polanski, a killing of his artistic being” explained the actress, who had recently made revelations about her love life.
“This gesture touches me”
“I find it incredible this way of puritanizing absolutely any action a little on the sidelines, a little punk. Because he slaps the other, are we going to scratch him from everything? Is it over, are we downgrading him definitively? What a nightmare ! Maybe he should have had a Xanax before going, that’s for sure. But OK. It’s suddenly life that arises and fucks the mess in all this ceremony. Me, this gesture touches me. I prefer that to good behavior. And Adèle, it’s the same thing, it was like an electrocution linked to her post-trauma” she continued.
This scene had obviously toured the planet for long weeks, through messages published on social networks or even debates on television sets. This slap was not without consequence for the actor of Men in Black, because he was ousted from the Academy of Oscars for at least ten years. Devastated after that, he notably pledged to work on himself and his issues of violence.