By now, it’s no spoiler that Will Smith appears in the final minutes of Bel-Air, the dramatic re-imagining of the iconic ‘90s sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air that premiered on the then-new streamer Peacock back in 2022 and concluded this week.
The original series helped launch the rapper-turned-actor’s colossal Hollywood career. In the Bel-Air series finale, the new and old Wills share a moment as Jabari Banks’ Bel-Air Will is returning to Philly, where he will attend Ivy League powerhouse the University of Pennsylvania, to take in one last sweeping view of Los Angeles. As he contemplates the many ways living with “his aunt and uncle in Bel-Air” has changed his life, he also worries he might lose the essence of his evolution back in his beloved city. That’s when future Fresh Prince Will Smith appears to reassure his younger self about the future.
Nailing that magical ending fell on Carla Banks-Waddles who joined the Bel-Air journey in the first season as a consultant before elevating to showrunner. Putting in extra duty, she penned the final episode titled “The Next Act,” which Bel-Air creator Morgan Stevenson Cooper directed. Tying it all up was more challenging with eight episodes instead of 10, she tells The Hollywood Reporter. In all, it was “a year’s process from the [start of the] writers room to post ending,” she shares.
Before they could wrap the series, however, they had to address season three cliffhangers like the death of Hilary’s (Coco Jones) pro football husband Lamarcus (Justin Cornwell) during their honeymoon, Viv’s pregnancy, Will’s kidnapping and Geoffrey’s disappearance, among other loose ends without ignoring the larger issues at play.
“There are so many buttons this show hits, and one of them is real conversations Black families would be having at this time,” she says. “A lot of the conversation in the writers room was, ‘It’s a time capsule.’ So when you look back at this show, even when you look back at the original, there are things that were going on in the world that were captured as sort of a snapshot in time.”
Season four, she says, captured “a lot of the DEI stuff that’s going on and how it’s not being seen as important, but also how Black people and people in the culture who are tired of always doing the work are tired and sort of protecting our peace and our joy.”
Adrian Holmes, who plays Uncle Phil, couldn’t be prouder of what Bel-Air has achieved. “We’re not defined by our struggle. We’re not defined by our trauma,” he tells THR. “We’re showing the joy, the ambition, the resilience. We’re showing the other side of the coin of who we are as a culture.”
His real-life wife, actress Caroline Chikezie — best known for her role as organized crime head Noma on the Starz series Power Book II: Ghost produced by Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson — joining the final season made it all the more special for him. “It’s our first time sharing the screen together,” he says of their adversarial roles in which Uncle Phil works to pry his friend and found family, Geoffrey, away the organized crime clutches of her character Dominique. “We got to create history,” he says.
Cassandra Freeman, who plays Holmes’s on-screen wife Vivian Banks or “Aunt Viv,” can’t praise Banks-Waddles and her leadership enough. But her real superpower, Freeman tells The Hollywood Reporter, is her ability to recognize and acknowledge everyone from behind the scenes, on screen and at home. “I feel like her theme is: I see you. She’s not interested in going off course. She’s like, ‘No, let people see themselves now so they feel like they are being seen.’”
Bel-Air, notes Banks-Waddles, welcomed OG Fresh Prince stars from the very beginning. The second Aunt Viv, Daphne Maxwell Reid, and Vernee Watson-Johnson, who played Will’s original mom Vy, showed up in the first season, and OG Geoffrey Joseph Marcell appeared in season three as part of Jimmy Akingbola’s Geoffrey’s criminal past in the UK.
But, for this final season, Banks-Waddles and her team delivered the big guns with original Aunt Viv, Janet Hubert, and OG Jackie, Tyra Banks, respectively, showing up in different roles as Iris, the doula who helps bring Baby Nicky into the world, and Viv’s sorority sister frenemy Regina Baxter now heading up their beloved sorority. Below, Banks-Waddles shares the details of how she and her team pulled off those awesome fan moments, along with what makes her most proud of the show they created.
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How did you pull off the huge coup of original Aunt Viv Janet Hubert and new Aunt Viv Cassandra Freeman sharing the screen together? And how did you decide this was the perfect way for her to be a part of something new, but also something foundational?
It’s always so nice to have the OG cast. It’s part of Bel-Air, and people love that. But we never wanted it to feel forced or gimmicky or have anyone say, “They just wanted somebody back, so they threw them in that role.” We knew that we were going to have a doula character, and we knew we wanted to build towards the birth of baby Nicky. So when we thought about Janet Hubert and wanting her to be on the show this season, that felt like the perfect role. Having OG Aunt Viv with our current Aunt Viv delivering baby Nicky all over again felt like such a poetic way to bring her back.
She embodied that character. When she walked on set, her dialogue and the way she interacted was beautiful. It was clear to everybody that this was perfect. You can have somebody in mind, and sometimes it just doesn’t work out with scheduling. She was coming from the East Coast, and you just never know if they will have a conflict. So all the stars aligned to get her here, and she wanted to be here. She was proud of Cassie and how she’s re-imagined that character. It felt full circle to have her on set.
How did you decide what role Tyra Banks would play, and that it would center this theme of healing female relationships?
We wanted to hide who Regina Baxter was going to be. So in that sixth episode when her sorority sister, who we’ve heard all these things about and know [Viv] didn’t have a great relationship with and “who wasn’t a great person and was really tough on me when I was pledging” and now ‘this horror story is in my house,” when she turns around and it’s Tyra Banks, you weren’t expecting that. To Tyra’s credit when I had conversations with her, she wanted to do the show. She was obviously OG Jackie, so it meant a lot for her to come back and be a part of this final season. She also traveled to get to L.A. to shoot her scenes. She wanted to be here.
In one of our conversations, she said, “I don’t want this to be a caricature of a Black woman just being somebody who’s mean for mean sake. What else is there behind her?’ So even though it was only two scenes, it was such a powerful moment for her to speak about her own trauma and how she was raised; a mom who wanted the best for her kid, but brought her own trauma and taught her to be strong before she taught her to just be soft, and that she’s had this armor up and that’s how she presented in life. That’s what made her cold and mean. Being able to have some healing between friends, these two Black women, and saying, “Let that shit go.” Even Hillary got some catharsis. It felt like such a meaningful role. Even though it was a short one, it spoke to something real.
So then talk about Will Smith. How did you guys bring that home? When did you know you were going to do it? Because that moment of having the two Wills together is so iconic.
I know. Again, you don’t know if a plan is going to come together. You just pray and hope. We had to pitch out the season to the studio and network and to our producing partners. We pitched that we wanted him in this finale, and they weren’t sure if he was going to be available. So we held on to hope, and it was on our board the whole season. But with travel, his schedule; he wasn’t even in the States. Some days it looked hopeful, and some days it was like it was just not going to happen: “Guys, you know he wants to do it, he wants to be here, but he is booked every single day.”
So we had two endings, one with him and one without him, and we found out maybe two weeks before we wrapped that he was going to be here and he was going to be available. So we shot both endings, and he stepped in. After we wrapped, we had one scene left, and that was his scene. So we were able to get him to just shoot that scene with Jabari. It felt like a great moment to have the two of them in a scene talking to each other about the future and just saying, “We’re going to be alright. So all that uncertainty that you’re carrying right now into your next act? Don’t worry about it. You’re going to live a life. There’s going to be some ups and downs but you’re going to be okay.”
That felt very poetic and perfect for him to be with us in this final season, because this is it. Everybody was just so excited that it worked out. It’s a great moment for the fans.
And finally, what do you want the ultimate takeaway to be about the work you’ve done on this series? What are you most proud of that you accomplished, and what will you take with you into the future with you?
I’m most proud of this Black family on television. Similar to the original, it was a family that we were proud of — that we wanted to live with, that we aspired to be, that we struggled with. I want people to be able to look back on this, and kudos to all the writers and crew and directors and cast for being part of what I think is going to be a huge legacy of looking back and being proud of this Black family and the stories we were able to tell.
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All four seasons of Bel-Air can be streamed on Peacock.
