It's been nearly 30 years since The Fresh
Prince of Bel-Air flip-turned the world of sitcoms upside down. While Will Smith has since adopted a wide
range of roles, he might have gotten some good training in drama on the set of this
hit TV show. Here are the dark secrets of the cast of Fresh
Prince. Will Smith was not chilling out, maxing, relaxing
all cool when he signed on to star in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. He was staring down some pretty serious IRS
debt from his career as a rapper alongside DJ Jazzy Jeff. In a 2018 episode of YouTube's Storytime,
Smith admitted that he'd spent all of his money on exorbitant purchases like expensive
cars and fancy clothes after the duo's album, He's the DJ, I'm the Rapper, went triple platinum
and earned a Grammy. But his follow-up effort flopped, which didn't
really help bolster his dwindling bank account. "I spent all my money. And I didn't forget, but I didn't pay the
IRS." At the time, Smith owed the IRS a whopping
$2.8 million. Opportunity fell into Smith's lap when he
met Fresh Prince producer Benny Medina while hanging out on the set of The Arsenio Hall
Show, and later had an impromptu audition during a party at Quincy Jones' house. Smith landed the lead, but the IRS took 70%
of his Fresh Prince paycheck for the next three years. Aunt Vivian, who served as the Fresh Prince's
beloved, sympathetic matriarch, is a woman with many facets. Two, to be exact. Janet Hubert played the role during the sitcom's
first three seasons, but was fired in 1993 and replaced by Daphne Maxwell Reid. The firing apparently had less to do with
Hubert's rumored on-set feuds and more to do with a dispute with network executives,
who reportedly had, quote, "some sort of vendetta against her," per Hubert's interview with
Jet at the time. Years later, in 2013, the actress opened up
to The Grio about the real reason she was recast, claiming NBC was unwilling to negotiate
her ultra-restrictive contract. She said: "It was a negotiation that should have come
back like most do. We were a very successful show and I felt
like I was an integral part of that, and felt valuable, but you cannot feel valuable in
Hollywood." Hubert sued the network and Will Smith for
allegedly creating "a hostile work environment" during her pregnancy, according to the New
York Daily News. This led to long-running rumors that NBC fired
Hubert because of her pregnancy, but it was written into her final season with the show. "Philip!" "Vivian!" "Philip!" "Vivian!" "Wilma!" Janet Hubert's feud with Will Smith is so
intense that it outlived the series by literal decades. Hubert blamed her 1993 contract dispute on
Smith, telling Jet: "[Smith] probably is responsible for my firing. He has a lot of clout. [...] He has gotten me fired from the show
and now he is trying to snatch my career away from me." In an earlier interview with an Atlanta radio
station, Smith said that Hubert wanted the series to be The Aunt Viv of Bel-Air Show. He added "No matter what, to her I'm just the Antichrist." In addition to calling Smith an "egomaniac"
nearly two decades later, Hubert said in 2009 that both Smith and Alfonso Ribeiro, who played
Carlton Banks, "destroyed" her career with "untruths," presumably about her bad attitude. She even reportedly begged Smith and his manager
to clear her name. While the jury is still out on that, Smith
did call Hubert "brilliant" and a "really powerful artist" in an interview with BBC
Radio 1Xtra in 2016. Janet Hubert undoubtedly had her issues with
Will Smith, but she might actually have more beef with her on-screen son, and for pretty
good reason. Alfonso Ribeiro, who went from dancing as
Carlton Banks to literally winning Dancing With the Stars in 2014, went after his TV
mom with a scathing comedy set in 2009. In a since-deleted video of the stand-up performance
unearthed by Perez Hilton, Ribeiro claimed Hubert was "crazy" and "went nuts" during
her time on Fresh Prince. Even though he admitted he wasn't legally,
quote, "allowed to talk about it," the actor dished, "There were days when we were all on the set
and she would literally go off on people, and they got to a point by the time the second
season came around where we're like, 'This is unacceptable.' [...] We felt like, when we were doing The
Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, that we were a family. [...] She, at that point, ruined that, and
she made it very difficult for us to work." This may have been what led to Hubert's claims
about Smith and Ribeiro's "untruths." Considering the show aired during an era before
text-message receipts and cell phone cameras, we'll probably never know the exact truth
of the matter. "You hate me, don't you?" Carlton was one of The Fresh Prince's most
iconic characters, and he certainly wouldn't have had the same magic if he was portrayed
by anyone other than Ribeiro, but that was almost exactly what happened. Ribeiro was actually fired before he really
got started. In an interview with Digital Spy in 2017,
the actor admitted that he landed the role after an audition, but after filming the pilot,
producers decided that Carlton should be recast. It's almost inconceivable, but they did eventually
come to their senses. Riberio said: "There was a moment where essentially I was
hired and rehired – you may look at it that way! There was a large chance that the Carlton
character would have been played by somebody else. But luckily enough, the decision was made
to continue to have me do it – and I guess the rest is history." History, indeed. It takes someone very special to pull off
those colorful outfits. Long before Donald Trump was tweeting from
the White House, he enjoyed the most bizarrely random acting career with cameos in dozens
of major motion pictures and TV shows, including Home Alone 2: Lost In New York and The Nanny. One of these appearances was actually on The
Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, but the future president reportedly wreaked minor havoc on set. Trump appeared in the 1994 episode "For Sale
by Owner," and according to an anonymous crew member who spoke to Newsweek, the businessman
was apparently pretty peeved about something that probably had to do with the script. Earlier that day, he'd reportedly expressed
concern to executive producer Gary H. Miller that his lines weren't funny enough. Miller claimed he'd never give Trump advice
about real estate, but he does know comedy, and told him, quote, "Trust me, you'll get
a laugh." "I like keeping a low profile." Later, the real estate mogul allegedly ended
up throwing the clipped-together pages of his script all over the floor, leaving then-wife
Marla Maples to clean up the mess. The anonymous crew member told Newsweek, "I started to help her pick them up, and [Maples]
goes, 'I got 'em, I got them, I'm so sorry.' It was such a really rude thing, the way he
did it. So terrible. So disrespectful [...] He just wasn't pleasant." According to Business Insider, Alfonso Ribeiro
sued the creators of Fortnite for allegedly copying his "Carlton dance" in 2018. The lawsuit claimed the dance was written
into an emote called "Fresh" in January of that year. The emote could be purchased for around $8,
or 800 v-bucks, which meant Epic Games seemed to be making money from the actor's moves
- that is, if Ribeiro actually owned them to begin with. A side-by-side comparison does show the dance
moves to be nearly identical. However, according to The Hollywood Reporter,
a supervisory registration specialist in the U.S. Copyright Office's Performing Arts Division
later explained that Ribeiro's copyright request "must be refused" because his choreography
was just a "simple dance routine." Even so, since the dance was created for Fresh
Prince, it's likely that NBC would own any related copyright if it was indeed allowed
to be copyrighted. All of this boded poorly for Ribeiro's case,
as well as the similar lawsuit he lobbed at Take-Two Interactive over dance moves featured
in NBA 2K. According to USA Today, the actor dropped
both suits in March 2019. There's a reason Will Smith was able to pull
out a tear-jerking performance in the season 4 episode "Papa's Got A Brand New Excuse"... "How come he don't want me, man?" ...he felt intimately acquainted with disappointing
father figures. While it appears he patched things up with
his dad later in life, at least according to an interview on The Graham Norton Show
in 2019, the star revealed that his troubled past with an abusive father had led him and
his wife to set some major boundaries, including avoiding the use profanities with each other
for over 20 years. In an episode of Jada Pinkett Smith's Facebook
Watch series Red Table Talk, Will Smith recalled telling his wife, "I grew up in a household where I watched
my father punch my mother in the face." Because of that, he said, he couldn't tolerate
profanity and violence in his relationships. Tatyana Ali, who played Ashley Banks, had
one of her most embarrassing moments - a major life milestone - on set. In an interview with Us Weekly in 2018, Ali
admitted she had her first real kiss on the show, but said it was, quote, "terrifying." It didn't help that both Alfonoso Ribeiro
and Karyn Parsons, her on-screen siblings, decided to come to set that day to watch it
happen even though they had nothing to do with that particular scene. Ali told the magazine, "I just remember Karyn Parsons, who played
Hilary Banks. Karyn, Alfonso [...] And we had our cameras
[...] The cameras on sitcoms are, like, huge cameras. And I just remember them looking behind the
camera [...] I mean, who has a first kiss like that? At the time, I wanted to die." Since then, Ali has managed to recover and
seems to have a healthy attitude about romance. The actress even told HuffPost in 2013 that
one-night stands were her "guilty pleasure." Who would ever want to watch a sitcom starring
a rapper? That's what Karyn Parsons was thinking when
she first heard about Fresh Prince. While speaking with NPR in 2014, the actress
revealed that she'd been working as a restaurant hostess in Hollywood before landing the sitcom
role — which she seriously questioned taking or even trying out for. Parsons said of her first audition, "I remember my first reactions being, 'Oh,
God, it's a sitcom with a rapper? Like, what's that?'" Regardless of her initial feelings about the
show itself, she also felt like she wasn't a good fit for Hilary. The character was originally an effortlessly
cool model, which made the TV star feel like trying out was "ridiculous" because she's,
quote, "not a model type." Instead of playing the role as it was written,
however, Parsons gave Hilary her signature bratty attitude, which is exactly what landed
her the part. But she continued to work at her day job until
Fresh Prince took off, just to be safe. For years, rumors have been flying around
claiming that the recurring scene in which Will's friend Jazz gets kicked out of the
Banks' mansion was actually only shot once because the network wanted to save money. In truth, it was shot multiple times, just
not every time the script called for it. Jeffrey A. Townes, a.k.a. DJ Jazzy Jeff, opened
up about this myth surrounding Fresh Prince in an interview with HuffPost in 2015. According to the actor/DJ, budget had nothing
to do with the shot. Rather Townes eventually put his foot down
because he couldn't endure the pain it caused. "When I did it maybe the third or fourth time,
because every time you shoot it to get a take, you probably have to do it about 40 times. Literally, black and blue by the time they
say, 'We got it.' And it got so bad the last time, and I was
like, 'I can't do this. I'm not a stuntman. I can't do it.'" Jeff has stayed safely behind the turntables
ever since the show ended. Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus, even more Nicki Swift videos about your
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