Chris Rock covers a lot of ground in his new GQ cover story — the first of the magazine’s Men of the Year honorees to be unveiled this year — opening up on the dissolution of his marriage and what porn had to do with it, why he makes smaller, tailored films like his new one, Misty Green, the future of his stand-up career and, of course, the infamous Oscar incident when he was slapped by Will Smith onstage.
Of the latter subject, he’s just ready to be done talking about it. “Yeah. Something happened. It wasn’t cool. And I would like to move on. I would like to — I had a nice career before it, and I know there’s a part of that that’s going to follow me the rest of my life,” Rock told GQ’s senior special correspondent Zach Baron. “I got jokes. I got scripts. I got movie scripts. I got TV shows. I’m writing a book. I’m doing shit. I have a plethora of art I’m trying to get out, and that’s what I want you to pay attention to, not some crazy night.”
Photo Credit: Richard Burbridge/Courtesy of GQ
That said, Rock has come to accept being asked personal questions these days due to living in a “gossipy” culture. “We live in a world where Andy Cohen is Norman Lear and Ryan Murphy is Steven Spielberg. That is the world we live in. So people want gossip. We’re righteous people that follow nine commandments. And the one commandment we don’t follow is thou shall not spread false witness. We are all about spreading false witness now. That is the world we live in. And that’s what journalism, or at least entertainment journalism, has become,” he explained.
And he played the game with Baron, dishing on his divorce from ex-wife Malaak Compton-Rock after 19 years of marriage.
“Nobody has a successful divorce, so that takes time. Then once it’s done, you’re not sitting on the money you had before, so now you got to really make some money. So you go on tour, or two tours. So there was a lot of stand-up. There was a lot of getting my life together. You got a pandemic, you got a bunch of nonsense going on there,” he revealed as he also took responsibility for the fracture. “I was not a great husband. I watched a lot of porn. I don’t watch porn anymore. I haven’t watched porn in five, six years.”
He did more work on himself than just cutting porn from his life, too, by going to therapy in an emotional state. “We do have this thing where everybody’s like — they brag about their therapy. Put it this way, my personal life wasn’t what I wanted it to be, and I’ll leave it at that. And that’s my relationship with everybody. So yeah, I went in there crying like a bitch. Like: What the fuck is going on?”
Looking ahead to the future, Rock, whose new film Misty Green hits Netflix on Nov. 9 after debuting in theaters via A24 last month, has plans to direct more feature films and possibly hit the stage again at some point.
“I got like six, seven specials, man. That’s a lot. So I don’t know. I’m not announcing anything or anything, but if I do it, I want to do it right. In sports, especially in football, they always talk about separation. ‘Can he get separation?’ You know what I mean? ‘Yeah, he’s fast, but is he fast enough? Can he get separation?’ And that’s the way I feel, like, as far as stand-up. As long as I can get separation, I’ll do it,” he noted. “I’m going to write. That’s basically what it boils down to. Wake up, write. That’s it. Just write, write, write, write, write. Get it all out.”
Rock’s full interview with Baron, which is also featured in the writer’s interview series “One More Question,” can be found here.
Photo Credit: Richard Burbridge/Courtesy of GQ
Photo Credit: Richard Burbridge/Courtesy of GQ
