Will Smith had his ear to a closet door, and on the other side it sounded like a stampede.
“I’m standing there and I got my head up against the door and I’m listening to people running and I’m hearing screaming and stuff,” he said in an April 2018 video on his own YouTube channel.
The room wasn’t much to look at. Will remembered a grubby utility closet with mops and what he called “interrogation lightbulbs.” It was the last place he expected to land on the night he’d finally gotten close to his idol.
The night was the BET Awards, and Michael Jackson was in the building. Will was no wide-eyed newcomer by then. The BET Awards started in 2001, and by that point he’d already headlined “Independence Day” and “Men in Black.” None of that mattered. He’d wanted to meet Michael for years.
He spotted him across the room, but the crowd was too thick to get through. As the hours went by, Will started to worry the whole show would end without so much as a hello.
Then he saw a gap. “A path! I’m about to meet Mike,” he remembered thinking, in lines Okayplayer quoted in 2018.
He didn’t get far. A scuffle broke out, people started running, and security grabbed him and pushed him into that closet to keep him out of it. The door closed, and he waited in the half dark.
“All of a sudden it starts to get quiet,” he said. When the noise outside faded, a voice came from somewhere behind him. It said one word: “hey.”
So who was it?
“I turn around and Michael Jackson is behind me in the closet,” Will said. “I was like, ‘Oh! Mike?'”
The man he’d chased all night had ducked into the same closet to wait out the same commotion. They talked a little about the trouble outside. Then Michael moved on to the subject he really wanted to discuss: comic books. He brought up a first edition of “Fantastic Four” and wanted to know about a trade, at about 2:11 in Will’s telling.
Will had nothing to offer and no idea what Michael was talking about. He wasn’t about to admit it.
“I don’t know nothing about no comic books, but I’m here with Michael Jackson. I ain’t gonna tell him that,” he said.
So the Fresh Prince stood among the mops and nodded along while the King of Pop talked comics. Listen for the moment Will turns around in the closet, at about 1:41.
Will Smith tells the story of meeting Michael Jackson in a closet
This is Will’s own upload from April 18, 2018, and it has passed 4.5 million views. The commotion and the hiding start at about 0:24, the closet at 0:58, the conversation with Michael at 1:41 and the goodbye at 2:49.
The chat didn’t last long. Michael’s bodyguard came in to get him out, and Will says the man “shoved me out the way like he never saw the Fresh Prince.”
On his way out the door, Michael caught his eye and told him, “I will see you around.” The two of them never did cross paths again. “That was the only time I ever met Michael Jackson,” Will said.