by Up for his first Emmy, Kevin Hart is more willing than ever to revisit that snafu with the Academy Awards (when he refused to apologize for past homophobic jokes).
In an interview with Deadline, Hart also said that while he’s quick to defend Ellen DeGeneres and Nick Cannon because they’re good friends to him, he understands that other people may have had different experiences with them.
His Netflix documentary series, Kevin Hart: Don’t F**k This Up, is up for an Emmy this year as Outstanding Unstructured Reality Program. It showed him doubling down defensively against other attacks on his character. (I was not a fan)
Here’s what he says now, in August 2020, regarding his non-apology for old jokes.
At the time, there’s a lot of feelings that came into play. Not to say that they were correct, but there was a lot of emotion and misunderstanding on so many fronts. I can only take responsibility for my front, and for what I feel I did wrong, or could have did better. I think that my cockiness got in the way, and the assumption of, “How could people even tie me into such a thing? How do they not know?”—instead of realizing that there’s so many people that don’t know who I truly am, and what I really am, that could take this in, and really feel like there’s a side to truth to it, because I didn’t take the time to address it correctly.
It wasn’t until I talked to so many peers and friends that I got a different understanding and realized the ball that I dropped, and the moment that I skipped over, and that was one, just acknowledging the hurt and pain of people that are going through what they’re going through—people that are dealing with it on levels that I can only imagine, and that I never even knew was real. For me, in those same conversations, it was about making my peers and friends understand I truly was ignorant to all of this. I had no knowledge about it; I had no understanding about it. So, if it wasn’t for the conversations, I wouldn’t have been able to get to a point of understanding.
In today’s time, we’re skipping over that. We’re skipping over the moment of resolution and solution, right? In order to change, there has to be a resolution. There has to be a moment of understanding, and then the opportunity to move on and grow, and get better and be better.
So, I was very thankful to have the relationships that I had, that opened up my eyes to these things, that painted the pictures that allowed me to see what I now see. But if it wasn’t for them, I would still be in a blind spot of just not knowing. From that experience, it made me better, it made me wiser, but more importantly, it made me aware.
