Leslie Jones recently spoke about Will Smith’s controversial slapping incident with Chris Rock.
“It made me so infuriated,” Jones told PEOPLE about watching from home as her close friend Chris Rock, 58, was slapped by Will Smith during the 2022 Oscars ceremony.
“You don’t know that I was going to jump in my car and roll up there. I was so f—ing mad on so many levels.”
In the star’s new memoir, Leslie F*cking Jones, out Sept. 19, she details first meeting Rock in the mid-90s and how over the years, as she struggled to find her footing on the standup comedy circuit, they forged a strong bond.
“He’s like my brother,” says Jones of the star, who threw her name in the ring for Saturday Night Live back in 2013 and convinced her to audition. “I was like ‘Why, those aren’t real comics’,” she recalls of questioning SNL. “He was like, ‘Shut up. You sound like an idiot.'”
Rock penned the foreword to her new book. Says Jones, “He’s just always there to give me the perfect advice when I need it.”
But in March of 2022, she recalls wanting to be there for him in his time of need. “For a long a– time I was just mad,” she says of the shocking slap. “Chris Rock did a f—ing joke.” She adds, “I know Will, too… I was like, you couldn’t handle that s–t afterwards. This is the Oscars. The whole world is watching.”
