Will Smith is opening up about the raw moment his daughter, Willow Smith, shaved her head in the middle of a global world tour.
Willow Smith, who was 10 at the time, had only just found worldwide fame from her hit 2010 single, “Whip My Hair.”
Will Smith, who was with his daughter on tour, spoke about when she decided she was done performing and said he’ll “never forget” that moment.
“We were in Dublin, Ireland. Willow comes off stage, she was on tour with Justin Bieber,” the actor said in a new documentary, “Number One on the Call Sheet: Black Leading Men in Hollywood.”
“Hit record, 20,000 kids whipping their hair in Dublin, and she comes off stage and is like, ‘I’m done, Daddy,’” he recalled. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, baby, that was a great show!’ And she was like, ‘No, no ― I mean I’m done! I’m ready to go home!’”
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“I was like, ‘Well, no ― you can’t go home, sweetie, you promised Mr. Jay-Z that you were gonna do these 30 days of this tour.’ She said, ‘No, Daddy, you promised Mr. Jay-Z, ’” the “King Richard” star said. “And I was like, ‘Sweetie, I get it, but we promised as a family and you have to finish.’”
“She looked at me ― I’ll never forget the look in her eyes — and she was like, ‘It doesn’t matter to you that I’m finished, Daddy?’ And I was like, ‘Well, yes, sweetie, it matters, but you can’t be finished. ’ And she was like, ‘Oh, OK.’”
The two returned to their hotel, and in the morning, the actor said that “she had shaved her head bald.”
“In the middle of her ‘Whip My Hair’ tour, she had shaved her head bald. And it was like a magical moment. I was like, ‘Got it!’” he exclaimed.
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Will Smith wrote about the incident in his 2021 memoir and recalled that Willow came skipping into the kitchen as she said, “Good morning, Daddy.”
“My jaw nearly dislocated, dislodged and shattered on the kitchen floor: My world-dominating, hair-whipping, future global superstar was totally bald,” the actor wrote. “During the night, Willow had shaved her entire head. My mind raced — how was she going to whip her hair if she didn’t have any? Who the hell wants to pay to watch some kid whip their head back and forth?”
Willow Smith later asserted that she took drastic action because she felt she had no control at the time.
“I was super young, and I had a dream, but all I really wanted to do was sing, and I didn’t equate that with all the business and the stress that ended up coming with it,” the now-24-year-old told People magazine in 2019.
“I was just like, ‘Whoa, this is not the life that I want,’” she said at the time, adding that shaving her head was “the perfect way to rebel.”
