Jabari Banks Reveals the First Thing He Did After Landing in L.A. for Bel-Air: "What Is My Life?"
Bel-Air actors Jabari Banks, Olly Sholotan, and Simone Joy Jones share their sweetest memories from when they started on the show.
With the first three episodes of Bel-Air's fourth and final season now streaming on Peacock, it's a great time to look back at how the drama series changed the lives of its cast.
The reimagining of the 1990s sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air stars Jabari Banks as central character Will Smith, whose mom sends him off to California to live with his rich aunt and uncle after he gets into some trouble in his hometown of West Philadelphia.
Will is in his senior year in Bel-Air's final season, working on figuring out his future alongside his classmates, including his cousin Carlton Banks (Olly Sholotan) and love interest Lisa Wilkes (Simone Joy Jones).
For all three actors, Bel-Air marked the first time they were featured as main cast members in a major television series, so their time on the series changed the course of their lives and careers.
Peacock Blog caught up with Banks, Sholotan, and Jones before the Season 4 premiere and they revealed how those early days at the start of the series set the tone for everything to come.
Banks, who like his Bel-Air character is also from Philadelphia, dished about the excitement of arriving in California to start work on the series, which debuted in 2022, and on one of the very first things that he did when he got there.
Jabari Banks on his favorite part of arriving in Los Angeles for Bel-Air
"One of my favorite memories is just the feeling of touching down in L.A. for the first time and driving past everything from the airport and going straight to Universal Studios," Banks told Peacock Blog about his first moments after arriving in Los Angeles to shoot the Bel-Air pilot. "It was just like, 'What is my life?' I'm sitting there in my hotel room, heart beating, and then I went down to CityWalk [in Universal Studios Hollywood] and I'm like, 'This is the best place in the world. I love CityWalk! I can't believe this King Kong hanging off this building.' And just that feeling in itself is enough to feed me for a lifetime."
Banks added, "That feeling of that first month, two months, the beginning of this whole thing, was like, 'Yeah.'"
Olly Sholotan remembers his first time meeting Jabari Banks
Sholotan remembered of his first-ever meeting with Banks that he picked him up at 10 a.m. for what was meant to be a short outing, but ended up lasting all day.
"We went for a drive... ," Sholotan told Peacock Blog during a joint interview with Banks and Jones. "We were supposed to hang out for a couple of hours. We ended up driving around L.A. until 11 p.m., then we ended up at the Shake Shack in West Hollywood."
Sholotan recalled the joy of booking the role of Carlton Banks, and of celebrating the news with Jones before they'd even met.
"I will never forget the moment I got the job," Sholotan told Peacock Blog. "Simone somehow figured it out, and we hadn't met each other at this point, so she video-called me on Instagram... I don't even remember where in America she was at that time, and she was like, 'You got it!' And I was like, 'You got it!' We had this moment before anyone else knew, and before the rest of the world knew, that our lives were about to change."
When Jones arrived in Los Angeles to begin shooting Bel-Air, she met up with Sholotan at the touristy restaurant, the Saddle Ranch Chop House. Sholotan recalled a surreal moment during that meeting with Jones when the actor who played Carlton Banks in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Alfonso Ribeiro, appeared onscreen in the eatery.
"As we're talking, So You Think You Can Dance was on the TV and Alfonso Ribeiro was like right there," Sholotan explained. "And we just had this moment of, 'Oh my god, we're a part of something now.' I will take that memory with me for as long as I live."
Jones still treasures the feeling of the cast's first weeks of filming. "I'd bottle that and then hold it and open it on any day," she told Peacock Blog.
She said her favorite memory from shooting four seasons of the series was during their first week of filming. "We're all on the beach," Jones said. "I remember we were just out until late. It was the scenes that I had auditioned with, so, watching it come to life."
Jones said she was nervous during filming. "And then I remembered Olly stuck around after his scenes to watch, and I remember him by the monitor, and he went, 'You look so beautiful,'" Jones recalled. "It was a sense of, 'Okay, people really care about the work and about each other,' and that really set the tone of how we treated each other, and [how] we're going to treat each for the rest of our four years."
How to watch Season 4 of Bel-Air
The first three episodes of Bel-Air Season 4 are now streaming on Peacock. Episodes 4 and 5 will drop on the streamer on Monday, December 1. And Episodes 6, 7, and 8 arrive on Monday, December 8.
