Will Smith reveals his journey to drop 20 pounds in 20 weeks shed more than just some extra weight. The Fresh Prince alum, who recently launched his new YouTube series Will Smith: The Best Shape of My Life, shed some light on his mental health, as well as other personal issues he was going through. The actor says he contemplated suicide at one point.
“When I started this show, I thought I was getting into the best shape of my life, physically. But, mentally, I was somewhere else. And, I ended up discovering a whole lot of hidden things about myself,” he said in a video. There’s a brief moment in a clip where he mentions to his family, “that was the only time in my life that I ever considered suicide.” He doesn’t dive into the details of what transpired in the moment, though he’ll likely discuss it a bit during the series.
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The release of the docuseries comes as he also released his memoir Will, where he promises he’ll be “exposing my life and so many things that people don’t know.” The Men in Black star shares there’s more behind the scenes that he tries to keep separate from the public eye. “What you’ve come to understand as Will Smith, the alien-annihilating MC, bigger-than-life movie star, is largely a construction, a carefully crafted and honed character designed to protect myself, to hide myself from the world. To hide the coward.”
The actor has opened up more and more in recent months. in September, he even hinted at having an unconventional marriage with his wife, Jada Pinkett-Smith. “Jada never believed in conventional marriage,” Smith told GQ. “Jada had family members that had an unconventional relationship. So she grew up in a way that was very different than how I grew up. There were significant endless discussions about, what is relational perfection? What is the perfect way to interact as a couple? And for the large part of our relationship, monogamy was what we chose, not thinking of monogamy as the only relational perfection.”
