Will Smith and DJ Jazzy Jeff starred in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air from 1990 to 1996. The beloved sitcom was watched by millions of people every week and made Smith a bona fide star. Jazzy Jeff, who played Smith’s best friend “Jazz,” was initially resistant to the idea. By this time, the Philly natives has already catapulted to fame as DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince. The duo’s sophomore album, 1988’s He’s The DJ, I’m Rapper, had gone platinum, earning them the first rap Grammy nomination in Recording Academy history. But speaking to AllHipHop, DJ Jazzy Jeff remembers he wasn’t all that “jazzed” about the television show.
“At first, I said no,” Jazzy Jeff says. “I wasn’t terrified. I wasn’t excited. I just didn’t have any desire. It’s really a life lesson. I learned it is possible to do more than one thing. I think I was so hell bent on my music that I never looked at, ‘Yeah, I could do this too.’ I never thought it could potentially help my music like it did. I felt like when I was asked to do the TV show, the way it came into my head was like, ‘You’re telling me to stop doing music and go do this?”’ That was my reason for saying no.”
But Smith was determined to win Jazzy Jeff over. He continued prodding him and was ultimately able to convince him to take the role.
“Ironically, at that point in time, everybody in the industry thought you could only do one thing,” he continues. “Will was the first rapper/actor. People criticized him when he first started acting and not because of his work. They criticized him because they didn’t think that you could do more than one thing. Now you look up and it’s LL COOL J, Ice-T, Queen Latifah and Ice Cube.
“But in the beginning, I don’t think I was the only one that approached it the way I did. So I said I wasn’t interested. But Will was a very good salesman. He sold me on the fact that they wanted me to do three episodes. And he said, ‘Listen, man, if you do one and you love it, you got two more to look forward to. And if you hate it, you only got two to do.’ So I was like, ‘OK.’ And I ended up doing nine episodes the first season.”
Jazzy Jeff, always in a pair of sunglasses, joined the cast alongside James Avery (Phillip Banks), Janet Hubert (Aunt Viv), Alfonso Ribeiro (Carlton Banks), Karyn Parsons (Hilary Banks), Tatyana M. Ali (Ashley Banks) and Joseph Marcell (Geoffrey the Butler).
“I wasn’t really hooked [on acting], but I think having fun was part of it,” he says/ “I never took myself too serious. I wasn’t out there trying to act. I was just like give me some lines, I’m gonna read them and people will laugh.”
Jazzy Jeff admits the sunglasses were there for his own protection—not because he was trying to look “cool.” He explains, “That that was fear. That was I didn’t want someone to see my eyes. Because if you saw my eyes, my eyes might have been like this [bugged out]. The beauty of it is there may have been 70 people on set at the most. I’m coming off a stage with 30,000 people. So 70 people was nothing to me because you don’t think about the millions who are gonna see it? If I did, it would have definitely been different.”
The last episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air aired on May 20, 1996, but the reruns haven’t stopped. A reunion special debuted on HBO Max in November 2020 and a dramatic reimagining of the series, Bel-Air, arrived on Peacock in February 2022.