Will Smith Predicted Losing His Career During Ayahuasca Hallucination Before Oscars Slap

It’s still not clear how Will Smith’s career will look going forward after he slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars 2022 ceremony, but the actor himself was worried about his prospects long before the incident. Smith is one of the guests on the newest season of My Next Guest Needs no Introduction with David Letterman. He discussed his deep-seated fear about losing his career, and how that fear manifested during his hallucinatory experience with the South American sacrament known as ayahuasca.

Smith’s interview with Letterman just dropped on Netflix this weekend, but it was recorded months before the Oscars according to a report by Entertainment Tonight. In it, he tells Letterman about his experience in an ayahuasca ceremony, which took place even further in the past. Ayahuasca is an herbal drink with a long history in South American shamanism, known for producing powerful hallucinations and sometimes religious experiences thanks largely to the compound DMT. Smith told Letterman that he was “terrified” by the idea of such an eye-opening trip, but eventually he “decided it was something that I wanted to try.”

Smith made it clear right away that he ascribed a lot of significance to the sensations and experiences he had during his ayahuasca ceremony. He said: “You’re not hallucinating. It’s like both realities are 100 percent present. So you know you’re in this room. You’re sitting in the room. You don’t lose sight. It’s not, like, superimposed on this reality. It’s totally separate.” Smith said that for him, ayahuasca showed him “the individual most hellish psychological experience of my whole life.”

“I’m drinking, I’m sitting there, and then, all of the sudden, it’s like I start seeing all of my money flying away, and my house is flying away, and my career is gone away,” he continued. “I’m like, ‘Ugh!’ And I’m trying to grab for my money and my career. My whole life is getting destroyed. My fear. I’m in there and I’m wanting to vomit and all of that. I hear a voice saying, ‘This is what the f- it is. This is what the f- life is.’ I’m [panting], going, ‘Oh, s-!’”

Smith said that things got even more terrifying when he thought he could hear his 21-year-old daughter Willow Smith calling out to him for help. He said that the shaman he was working with helped to calm him down when panic set in, and he realized that his concern for his daughter had far superseded his insecurities about his career and his wealth. He said “slowly, I stopped caring about my money, I just wanted to get to Willow.”

“I stopped caring about my house. I stopped caring about my career,” he continued. “I get to the point where I settled down, and the voice is still at 100 percent, I still hear Willow screaming, my money is still flying away, but I’m [taking deep breaths] and I’m totally calm, even though there’s hell going on in my mind.”

“I realized that anything that happens in my life, I can handle it. 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,” he said. “That’s part of the psychological training that happens in ayahuasca. First of all, 99 percent of the s- you worry about never happens. 99 percent of your pain and your misery is all self-generated. It’s not real.”

Hopefully, Smith has carried this perspective over to his current dilemmas and the uphill road he now has to walk if he wants to get back to A-list stardom. Smith’s interview with Letterman is now streaming on Netflix, along with five other brand new interviews. At the time of this writing, DMT is a heavily controlled substance in the U.S., but the União do Vegetal and the Santo Daime Church has been granted legal freedom to use ayahuasca for religious purposes. You can find more information on the sacrament here.