Somebody in my astrology group chat DM’d me the exact moment Will Smith slapped Chris Rock on the Oscars stage and my first message back was: I need his chart. Because that was a Mars-Pluto moment if I’ve ever seen one, and Mars-Pluto moments have to be sitting somewhere in the chart of the person having them. They don’t come out of nowhere.
Mars is aggressive, assertive, brave, protective. Mars will cut a b for somebody they love. Pluto is what you get when you dig underneath the aggression — the subterranean rage, the willingness to burn something down. Put them together and you get zero effs available. Nobody home to talk you out of it.
I know this because I have had one Mars-Pluto day in my adult life and I threw a drink on a person in a public restaurant after we got into an argument. I am not a person who throws drinks on people. I am the calm one. But on that day I had zero effs to find. That’s the energy. So when I saw Will get up, I knew what I was looking at, and I knew it had to be in the chart somewhere.
Two other things I already knew before I ever cast the chart. One, I’d been listening to his audiobook, which is where he says his birth time out loud. So the natal chart was already going to be accurate. Two, the world was in Aries season — Sun and Mercury both freshly moved into cardinal fire — so there was a general appetite for confrontation in the air. But cardinal fire in the air doesn’t get everybody up on stage. It got him, specifically. So the question is why him.
Why him: Mercury in Libra, ruled by a Venus at the 29th degree
Will has Gemini rising. That makes Mercury his chart ruler — the planet that represents him personally on any given day. His Mercury is in Libra, conjunct Venus, both at the tail end of the sign.
Venus is doing a lot of work in his chart. It rules his house of stress. It co-rules his house of self-undoing. And it’s sitting at the 29th degree. The anaretic degree. The destructive degree. So the planet ruling his stress is stressed. It’s about to change signs, meaning it’s about to spill into something new, and it doesn’t have anywhere stable to sit.
He is also, functionally, always with his stress and his self-undoing, because Venus is right there conjunct him. And because Venus rules Libra, Venus is disposing his Mercury too — there’s a control loop where he can’t fully separate from what’s stressing him.
That’s the base chart. Now watch what happens when you add the partner.
The partner problem, baked in
In Will’s chart, Jupiter represents his partner and it also represents his desires. Meaning: his person and what he wants for his life are locked together. That’s already intense before you notice what Jupiter is doing — it’s conjunct Pluto and in a wide conjunction with Uranus.
Partner-with-Pluto is dicey. It’s power dynamics that never quite settle. Sometimes he’s in the driver’s seat and his person feels powerless. Sometimes the roles flip and he gets pulled into the underworld by her. Neither position feels safe.
Partner-with-Uranus is hot and cold. Someone who needs freedom, who might dip off, who values independence over the pair-bond. I’ve talked about this pattern in the Insecure post — same placement, same story.
So he’s attracted to people who need to be free, and he’s locked into a power struggle with them, and his partner and his desires are the same object. This is what he’s carrying every day.
The 11th house and the Aries wound
His Chiron and North Node are both in Aries in the 11th house. Read that as: karmically, he’s here to stand up for himself, be independent, follow his dreams, stop being seen as the little punk.
He’s talked about this in his own words. He was rapping about parents just don’t understand and summertime while everybody else was rapping about fighting and killing, and it made him read soft. The nicest guy in Hollywood. His Libra stack — Mercury, Venus, and Sun all in Libra — reads exactly like that guy. But the South Node is also in Libra, meaning that nice, agreeable, always-partnered version is what he’s supposed to be moving away from. The North Node in Aries says: get up. And his joy point is in Aries in the 11th, meaning he actually wants to be the rough-and-tumble version of himself. He plays it in his acting. Mike Lowrey is exactly that guy.
Then his Sun — the significator for his father — is in Libra in fall, conjunct the South Node. He writes in the book about his father’s alcoholism and his father’s abuse of his mother, and about the guilt he still carries for not protecting her when he was a kid. The chart has been holding that wound the whole time.
Nothing on this stack has changed since he was born. What changed on Oscar night is that transits walked right up to it and rang the bell.
What the sky was doing that night
Look at the 10th house — his public voice, career, mother. The Moon was there, at 15 degrees Aquarius, on the cardinal axis. Which is astrologese for: emotions on the world stage.
Right next to the Moon: Mars. Assertive, protective, ready. Moon-Mars is an emotional ticking time bomb, and normally these aspects come and go quickly because the Moon is fast. This one hit while he was sitting in the front row on the biggest night of his career.
Also in the stack: Venus. Fold in a Moon that represents family and you get someone fighting for his family and the woman he loves, who are essentially the same thing to him.
Also in the stack: Saturn. Saturn rules his career and his 8th house. The 8th is fear and situations of physical danger. So he’s tied his career and his danger together in the 10th house at the same time. Best Actor win — the career-defining thing he’d been chasing for years — plus a real physical risk, because we don’t know what Chris Rock could have done. Chris happened to handle himself. It could have gone another way.
Meanwhile Mars rules his house of self-undoing and co-rules his house of stress. Venus rules his stress and co-rules his self-undoing. Every one of the planets pileup in his 10th is a planet that runs his stress or his own worst impulses. All of them are on the roof of the chart on the biggest broadcast of his life.
Jupiter — partner and desires — sits strong in Pisces but applying to a conjunction with Neptune. So the partner is about to bring disappointment. Jupiter-Neptune is what my teacher Michael O’Brien calls the Jesus signature: self-sacrifice for the person you love. That is the frame Will was in.
And he himself, as Mercury, is in the 11th house of hopes and dreams. Fulfilling a dream. But Mercury in Aries is peregrine — feels out of place, doesn’t belong. Right there with him: Chiron. In Aries. Exactly the wound around not standing up for the women in his life.
Chris makes a G.I. Jane joke about Jada’s bald head — Jada has alopecia, whether Chris knew that or not — and the Chiron wound opens. The story Will has been carrying since childhood — I didn’t protect my mother — surfaces. And he does not stay in his seat.
Saturn and Venus are sitting at the southern bendings of the nodes, which is a release point. A place where you sacrifice and let go. He walked up there and gave up years of a public image for a moment of protection.
The solar return: neptune rising, him and his career both in the 12th
His solar return runs from September 2021 to September 2022, so the Oscars sit deep inside it.
The solar return has Neptune rising. Disillusionment, a pull to escape, a sense that things aren’t what he thought they were. Chiron is rising too. Wounds keep resurfacing at the front of the picture.
Will himself, as Jupiter, is in the 12th house of self-undoing. Retrograde. In Aquarius. The planet ruling that 12th is Saturn, also retrograde in domicile. He’s being stripped down. Meanwhile the 10th house rises in this solar return, meaning it’s a career-forward year — and his career (Saturn) sits in the same 12th as him. Him and his career are both in self-undoing for the year.
Add Venus opposite Uranus in the solar return. Venus-Uranus is a separation signature. Not a divorce guarantee, but it shows up in divorces.
Jada shows up in his solar return as Mercury in Libra in his 8th of shared resources, anxiety, and fear. Venus and Saturn are together by declination — Venus-Saturn is separation and love. Every angle you approach this from tells you the same thing.
Her chart briefly
Jada is Sagittarius rising, so she is Jupiter. Sag is mutable fire, always in motion. Keeping her put has always been a challenge. Saturn in her 7th rules her money — a real relationship between her money and her partner. Will, as her Moon, sits in her 10th — his money and their shared finances are visible to the public, and comparatively he’s bringing in the bigger checks.
Mercury in her chart plays two roles: her partner and her mother, Gammy. Both squared by Neptune. Neptune-square-a-planet can indicate substance abuse, which is documented in Gammy’s history. Same pattern, playing out through a second person in her life.
Jupiter is in Pisces on Neptune in her chart too. So Jupiter-Neptune, the Jesus signature, runs through her chart as well. Same self-sacrifice thread.
Her solar return is a 2nd house rising year. Money in focus. Saturn in Aquarius retrograde as her significator — powerful, in domicile, but retrograde and unable to use the power. Venus angular, Venus-Uranus opposite, Venus-Saturn square exact. Same hard-year story.
Pluto is rising in her solar return. The one time I had Pluto in my 1st house I woke up every day wanting to break up with my partner. Because Pluto in the 1st opposes the 7th — whatever’s transforming inside you hits the partner. Wondering if that’s what she’s carrying now.
If they separate coming out of this, I won’t be surprised
Neptune in Will’s 1st house of the solar return can be deception in the environment. Uranus in Jada’s 4th, instability at home. Both of them coming out of this year exposed to more than the two of them together can hold.
They’ve been fixtures. We grew up watching them. We want the best for them. But the astrology is telling a rough passage story, and a lot of what was under wraps for a long time is coming to the surface.
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