Tatyana Ali Tells All About ‘Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’ & Where She Is Now
What To Know
- Tatyana Ali credits Will Smith for making The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air set feel like a great place to learn comedy.
- After Fresh Prince, Ali pursued music, continued acting, and launched Baby Yams.
- Her latest project is a children’s book aimed at celebrating the magic of children’s imaginative play.
From her early days on Sesame Street and The Cosby Show to her years playing Ashley Banks on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Tatyana Ali has grown up with the world watching.
Before joining the cast of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in 1990, Tatyana was performing in front of a studio audience thanks to her work on The Cosby Show. “I was definitely comfortable performing in front of an audience, but comedy was a new thing for me. On The Cosby Show, my character was a friend of Rudy’s character, so I didn’t get a lot of jokes necessarily. Most of my roles had been drama, so I really had to learn comedy on Fresh Prince,” she told ReMIND Magazine. “But it was a great place to learn because Alfonso Ribeiro had done so many sitcoms leading up to it, and Will was also learning. It was a steep learning curve, but I was kind of in a classroom.”
Will actually came onto the show as a rookie actor after his success in the music world. While he was obviously learning as well, Tatyana learned some things from him, too.
© Warner Bros./ Everett Collection
“I think the freedom that we had with ad-libbing came from Will. He was a rapper, while I’d come from Broadway and theater, where you stick to the script,” she shared. “His playfulness and that experimentation of seeing what plays with the crowd, I think that had something to do with his musical background. So we took that spirit on, and we’d ad-lib. Some of the funniest moments in the show came from that.”
At the time of the show’s peak popularity, word on the street was that tape days of Fresh Prince were close to the hottest party in town.
“I loved it. We had a DJ, which nobody really did back then. It was music-filled, and Quincy Jones and his kids would come on Fridays. Heavy D would stop by, and Queen Latifah would be there,” she tells. “The cast from A Different World would come on Fridays for our tape days. It sure felt like a party to me as a kid, just meeting while you’re onstage doing your thing and then looking behind the camera and seeing all of these people that you admire and get to watch. Oh, it was definitely a party. I remember also during the week, during rehearsals, we had fun. We worked really hard, but we laughed till we cried almost every day in rehearsals. We had a good time.”
Following Fresh Prince, Tatyana focused on her own music and started touring, and also continued acting.
Now a mom of two sons, she’s spread her wings to succeed outside of the TV bubble while doing her part to make the world a better place (10% of all proceeds from her Baby Yams brand of handmade baby quilts are donated to support community birth workers).
“In the very beginning, when I put out the first 50 blankets, I didn’t think Baby Yams was necessarily going to be something after that. It was just a one-time project, but it did so well. I saw it as a vehicle to help tell the story of the care that mamas deserve to have from our healthcare system,” she explains.
Tatyana’s newest project is her children’s book, Aszi and the Octopus, on bookshelves now.
“The idea came from my oldest. He’s always loved octopuses. He loves marine life, and it’s been an opening for me as a mom to get him to read and be interested in math and science and all these things,” she says. “I wanted to get into his imaginary world and honor it. I achieved a lot at a young age, and that’s very important, but I love the idea of letting our kids play, and I wanted to celebrate that. So that’s really what I hoped to get across in the book. There’s magic in our children’s play worlds if we let them just play.”
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