Eighteen months after her husband hit Chris Rock at the Oscars, the actress is revealing everything about Hollywood’s most unconventional relationship. Plus, read an extract from her tell-all memoir.
The thing that people get wrong about that Oscars night, says Jada Pinkett Smith, is they think it was her fault. As everyone and their dog knows by now, on March 27, 2022, the comedian Chris Rock, one of the Oscars presenters that night, spotted Pinkett Smith in the audience next to her husband, Will Smith, who was the favourite to win best actor for his performance in King Richard, the biopic of the tennis-playing sisters Venus and Serena Williams and their coach father. Pinkett Smith has alopecia and had recently started shaving her head and Rock made an off-the-cuff crack about her resembling GI Jane. Smith got out of his seat, went on stage and slapped Rock. The world reeled. “Keep my wife’s name out of your f***ing mouth,” Smith bellowed after sitting down.
“People thought I gave Will a look and ‘made’ him do it. But let me start with this: nobody can make Will Smith do anything, and surely not me. If I could make Will do anything the last three decades of my marriage would have looked totally different. Real talk, right? And I also want to say, it’s really ironic how women are considered — what do you say, irrelevant? Until a man does something that’s unsavoury, and suddenly she has all the power in the world to make him do that,” Pinkett Smith tells me.
We’ll get back to Pinkett Smith’s marriage, but she is right that she didn’t give Smith a look. I know, because I was at the Oscars that night and I had a clear view of Smith and Pinkett Smith. It seemed to me, I say, that what happened was Smith initially laughed at Rock’s joke, looked at his wife, saw her rolling her eyes at Rock, realised she wasn’t amused and then he got angry too and single-handedly — literally — destroyed his long-standing reputation as one of the friendliest megastars in the business. Was that her experience?
Pinkett Smith hesitates before answering. “Whatever Will’s reaction was, that’s for Will to say. But when Chris made that comment I rolled my eyes because I know how real alopecia is, and to make fun of a condition that people have no control over, that makes them live in shame? So I didn’t feel like laughing because I didn’t find it funny, and I’m not a robot.
Rock and Pinkett Smith had history. At the 2016 Oscars Rock mocked Pinkett Smith for saying she was boycotting the Oscars for being too white. “Jada boycotting the Oscars is like me boycotting Rihanna’s panties. I wasn’t invited!” Rock said on stage. So Pinkett Smith was braced for teasing at the 2022 Oscars. “When I saw Chris’s face earlier that evening I thought, I hope he plays nice tonight. But he didn’t play nice,” she says.
Minutes after the slap Smith won the Oscar and gave a rambling, tearful speech. I again looked at Pinkett Smith and she seemed to be gazing up at him with pride. What was she thinking? “I really was just in Neverland then, to be honest with you.”
Smith has since issued a public apology. Has Pinkett Smith been in touch with Rock? “No.” Would she like to be? Long pause. And then: “Here’s what I’ll say — I’m always open for healing.”
What even more people get wrong about that night is that she and Smith weren’t at the Oscars as a couple; they had been separated for six years, although they hadn’t announced it. But when Smith got the nomination he asked Pinkett Smith to come with him. “He said, ‘Look, we’ve been in this for three decades and I want you by my side in this moment.’ And I was like, ‘Cool.’ But we hadn’t called each other husband and wife since 2016,” she says.
They still don’t. They are, she says, “life partners — we are in a life partnership”.
They live near each other in Calabasas, the suburb outside of LA that recently overtook Beverly Hills as the wealthiest area in the US. The Kardashians live there, as do Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus. Pinkett Smith, an actress with a long career in TV and movies (The Nutty Professor, The Matrix Revolutions), and I are meeting in her PR’s office in Calabasas. From the window she can just about see all of her family’s houses. “The whole Smith crew is here!” she says, referring to her and Smith’s children, Jaden, 25, and Willow, 22, and her stepson Trey, 30, from Smith’s first marriage to the actress Sheree Zampino. Smith, 55, is still in the family home, a US$56 million mansion so mega it has its own postcode. Pinkett Smith has her own house nearby.
“But to be honest with you, I think eventually we will [live together again.] I really do. Will’s getting old. I’m staying quite young, but it’s getting apparent to me that he’s gonna need someone to take care of him,” she says.
Pinkett Smith looks at least a decade younger than her 52 years. Today she’s dressed in a style best described as cool stealth wealth: an oversize black velour tracksuit, black furry Ugg slides and manicured fingernails so long and sharp they could probably rip Rock’s eyes out without breaking. Her hair is short and dyed a pretty pink shade, and on her cheek is a small pink heart. “Oh, that’s a little heart pasty to cover a pimple,” she laughs when I ask about it. She is both terrifyingly glamorous and deliciously candid: I feel I could ask her anything and she would answer honestly.
We are here to discuss her new memoir, Worthy, in which one of the lower-order jaw-dropping revelations is that Jaden and Willow shared their parents’ bed until they were six and four. So how did she and Smith maintain any kind of love life?
“Let me tell you what I did,” she replies without hesitation. “We had a love nest in our closet. This beautiful blue dome with twinkle lights in the ceiling with a circular mattress bed. We built that house, so I created that nest knowing [we’d need it], and we would sneak into the love nest at night-time. So trust me, I had that handled.”
Does she ever think, ‘Maybe I should keep this detail about my life to myself?’ She thinks about that for two seconds: “Nah. Let the light in!”
Pinkett Smith’s candour has got her in trouble at times. From 2018 to 2022 she hosted a talk show, Red Table Talk, on Facebook Watch, on which she, Willow and her mother, Adrienne Banfield Norris, discussed everything, from Willow’s experiences of growing up in the spotlight to Pinkett Smith’s addiction to sex toys.
In July 2020 she released an episode featuring just her and her husband, in which they discussed what she called her “entanglement” with August Alsina, a man 20 years her junior. Alsina had recently revealed their former relationship in an interview, sparking a deluge of headlines about the Smiths, who heretofore had been considered one of the most solid couples in Hollywood. Now there were rumours that they had been in an open marriage for years. So Pinkett Smith decided to “clear the air”.
For those who grew up watching Smith and his rise from the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to the King of Hollywood, who remembered him as the cheeky rapper behind Parents Just Don’t Understand and Summertime, the air seemed very sad indeed. He looked beaten down and had bloodshot eyes as they revealed they had separated in 2016. Pinkett then started her “entanglement”, which lasted until 2018.
“An ‘entanglement’? You mean a relationship,” Smith said sharply in the 2020 broadcast. “It had been such a long time since I felt good,” she said by way of explanation, and Smith looked like a man on the verge of unravelling.
Smith and Pinkett Smith said afterwards that, despite appearances, he wasn’t actually crying: he was tired, his eyes often run, and so on. Nonetheless it was hard to watch that interview and not see him as the more sympathetic partner, and the ground was laid for people to blame her at the Oscars 18 months later.
“You gotta remember where our relationship was at that time,” she says. “We were supposed to come to the table and go, ‘We are separated and we’re figuring it out.’ But Will wasn’t ready for that and so my co-dependency kicks in and I think, ‘I want you to come out of this as unscathed as possible.’ So if that means me taking on the narrative of adulterous wife, I’ll do it.’ "
Did she and Smith have an open marriage? “That is a misconception that comes from people not knowing about these other stops we’d taken,” she says, meaning it wasn’t widely known that they were separated. Instead, she says, they had a “transparent marriage”, a concept she came up with when their kids were young.
“At that time Will was one of the most sought-after actors in the world and around so many beautiful women — I wasn’t going to set us up for betrayal,” she says. “So I was like, ‘Let’s just deal with this from the gate. You’re gonna be on sets a lot, I’m gonna be home with the kids. Let’s get real and approach this as friends.’ "
So the two of you could have casual encounters with other people? “No, no, no! If you’re having a casual encounter then we are not together!” So the transparent marriage wasn’t about extramarital sex? “Right! It was about talking about feelings and being able to say, ‘I’m attracted to this person, you need to come out here and be with me for three weeks.’ That kinda thing.”
Despite the transparency, the Smiths separated in 2016. The vilification they got after the Oscars brought them closer — “we started walking a new path” is how she puts it — but they are not together.
Worthy gives some insights into why that might be. At some points in the book Pinkett Smith comes across as a real piece of work, such as when President Clinton invited the family to stay at the White House for 1999 New Year’s Eve. Pinkett Smith wasn’t having any of it and insisted she wouldn’t stay in “Lincoln’s dusty-ass bedroom”. Smith, she writes, thought she was being “ridiculous” and overruled her. “I survived,” she writes of her night at the White House.
At other points their problems are more relatable, such as her frustration at always being seen as her husband’s plus one, and while his focus was on his career, hers was on the family. “Every relationship has to deal with that on some level, when people have different priorities,” she says. Albeit not usually in the global spotlight.
It’s a shame that Pinkett Smith’s marriage has taken up so much attention because, as Worthy shows, it’s far from the most interesting thing about her.
She was born in Baltimore, Maryland, when her mother, Adrienne, was only 17. Her parents divorced soon after and Pinkett Smith was especially close to her maternal grandparents, who taught her the importance of hard work. But by the time she was 14 she had lost her virginity and was soon dealing cocaine. Meanwhile her mother was a high-functioning heroin addict, working as a nurse by nights and getting high and selling drugs the rest of the time.
“Being an African-American, unfortunately that was not an unusual experience. A lot of us that you’ll talk to in this industry — whether they are open about it or not — we’ve all touched that realm. Whether we dealt drugs, did drugs, had parents that were addicts, siblings, we’ve all been touched by the street pharmacy,” she says.
This experience, Pinkett Smith writes, prepared her for Hollywood, in terms of dealing with predators and refusing to be ripped off financially. But it took a while for her to lower her defences. In the late 1990s she turned down a role in the film Bulworth — a political satire written and directed by Warren Beatty — because she told Beatty she thought the script was “culturally inauthentic”. Beatty took her out for lunch the next day. “He told me, ‘You don’t have to be so defensive, with a chip on your shoulder.’ And it was good because, coming from the streets of Baltimore, I’m looking at everything like it’s war. He said, ‘You can relax a little, OK?’ And I thought that was beautiful.” (Halle Berry took the role. Bulworth was later criticised for reinforcing black stereotypes.)
How did she tell her children about her drug-dealing past? “Oh, that was easy. Part of the reason my children and I are so close is I’ve always presented myself to them as human first, sharing my stories with them so they would see my humanity.”
Despite all the problems in her childhood home, she worked hard at school and graduated. One of her closest school friends was the rapper Tupac Shakur, but she emphasises in the book that their relationship was never sexual. “We just never had that kind of attraction, and the one time when he did kiss me, it just felt pretty disgusting, I gotta say,” she says.
After high school she and Shakur separately made their way to Los Angeles, where he pursued music and she broke into acting, landing a role on A Different World, a spin-off sitcom from The Cosby Show. She and Shakur looked out for each other and, as his career took off, he introduced her to people such as the directors Allen and Albert Hughes, who in 1993 cast her in Menace II Society. Later that same year Shakur was charged with sexually assaulting a fan, Ayanna Jackson, which he denied. He was found guilty and convicted. Pinkett Smith says that prominent black feminists told her to disown him. “But he was my brother. I wasn’t going to abandon him,” she writes in Worthy. Does she still think that was the right decision? “I did not know Pac to be a liar. Ever,” she says.
Shakur was released after nine months. Less than a year later he was shot in Las Vegas and died six days later. No one at the time was prosecuted.
By chance, two days after our interview, Duane Davis was charged in connection with Shakur’s murder. I email Pinkett Smith to ask how she feels about this extremely belated development. “Now that an arrest has been made around Tupac’s murder, I’m hoping we’ll get some closure,” she writes straight back.
She met Will Smith when she auditioned to play his girlfriend on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. She didn’t get the part, but in 1995, after Smith got divorced from his first wife, he called her and they were soon dating. It’s hard to think of two Nineties rappers more different than Smith and Shakur. Did Shakur ever laugh at her for dating the Fresh Prince? “No! Actually, any other time I was dating someone he had a lot to say, and not very good things. But he never said anything about Will, which led me to believe he approved,” she says.
Their courtship sounds extremely heady, with Smith taking her by private jet for surprise weekends away, and so on. Yet, she writes, it was his “intelligence” that made her fall for him. Two years later, when she was 25, after a night that, she writes, left them “breathing hard, post-passion”, she became pregnant with Jaden. Smith proposed and she accepted, but refused to sign the prenup. If she had signed that, she writes in Worthy, “divorce might have been a reality”. Does she really think not having a prenup later saved them from divorce? “What I was trying to say was that I made a promise there would be no reason to ever have a prenup, because I would always be willing to work it out,” she says.
In the book she writes that she and Smith are both “adamantly against divorce”. But what’s the difference between being separated and being divorced? “Well, we needed the time. Will and I got married at an early age and we were able to make some beautiful things and some not so beautiful things. We got to a place where we had to go our separate ways in order to break from some of those more immature fantasies of what being married was about. And bear in mind, when we had that separation in 2016 the goal was to divorce, but divorce just didn’t feel right for either of us. We don’t know why. But here we are.”
They are still close enough to feature regularly on one another’s Instagram, along with Jaden and Willow. Possibly the weirdest moment of that now infamous Oscars night was at the Vanity Fair party afterwards, when everyone assumed Smith would be licking his wounds at home. Instead the whole Smith clan turned up and Smith cleared the dancefloor by dancing to his own song Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It. As a family statement it felt like defiance. “We are a very tight-knit group. We ride hard for each other,” she says.
Jaden started acting in his dads’ films such as The Pursuit of Happyness and The Karate Kid from the age of eight. Willow announced at age seven she wanted to be a pop star, and because her parents are who they are she became one. She was signed to Jay-Z’s label and released the mega hit Whip My Hair in 2010. She was about to go on a world tour and star in the remake of Annie when she tearfully told her parents she didn’t want to do any of it. After some reluctance on their part, they agreed.
“I think it wasn’t easy for my children, living an isolated life, behind gates and always with security,” she says.
Did she have any concerns about putting them in the spotlight from such a young age? She doesn’t hesitate: “No.” What does she think about all the recent conversations around “nepo babies” — Hollywood kids who owe their careers to their famous parents? She flicks her hand. “People can have any conversation they want about nepo babies. Go for it.”
Willow has since gone back to music and Jaden is a rapper. The last film he made with his father was 2013′s schlocky sci-fi After Earth, which many critics claimed was inspired by the teachings of Scientology. There have long been questions about the Smiths’ connections to the church. In 2008 they founded a school in Calabasas, the New Village Leadership Academy, based on an education methodology developed by L Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’s daughter Suri attended the school. In Worthy Pinkett Smith insists she is not a Scientologist. Yet Jacqueline Olivier, who co-founded the academy, has said there were pictures of Hubbard in the classrooms. Is that true? “That is very wrong,” Pinkett Smith laughs. The school shut in 2013.
There are also news reports saying the couple donated more than $100,000 to the church, I say. “We might have given money to the church. Definitely. But based on a specific programme. I think it was for the 9/11 firefighters,” she says.
She writes that working on Collateral in 2004 was “a wonderful opportunity to become good friends with Tom Cruise”. Was it Cruise who introduced her to the church? “Bzzzz!” she says, making the sound of a “wrong” buzzer on a game show. “I was actually introduced to Scientology way before. But I’m not going to say who by, because one thing I don’t need is the pitchforks going in that direction.”
These days Pinkett Smith describes herself as “a spiritual seeker”, and when she learns I am Jewish she tells me how much she loves Yom Kippur (“So beautiful”). But what she really enjoys is ayahuasca, an intense psychedelic, which she has taken with her kids (naturally) and Smith. “I think it has brought him a lot of clarity. Plant medicines are very healing, helping you to see you don’t have to hold on to certain things,” she says.
Some have suggested that Smith has become a pariah in Hollywood since the Oscars. She says the two of them are very busy with work, but she can’t talk about it due to the actors’ strikes.
Is she dating anyone? “Hell, no!” she says. “The one thing I realised in this whole journey, and through all the difficulties I’ve been through with Will, is that my dynamic with him is my greatest teacher in terms of healing. So that is my focus.”
How I fell for Will Smith — by Jada Pinkett Smith
I have to be honest, me falling for Will Smith was very unexpected. From afar, and even after meeting him a couple of times in the Hollywood whirl, I concluded that Will Smith would never have been on my radar — only because he was so … cheerful. That was a sticking point. Cheerful didn’t represent itself as deep, and my young mind believed a troubled person was a deep person. To my surprise, Will proved to be one of the most complex individuals I’d ever meet. We had more in common than I could have imagined, but it was his irresistible charm that stole my heart — and, in time, that of the world.
And here we are, after eight months of his unstoppable “charm offensive”, on Thanksgiving Day in Jamaica. Everything has been a blur, from our first jaunt that began: “Where are we going?” “You’ll see. Pack a bag.” “Oh, a private jet?” (This was before everybody in Hollywood had to have their own private aeroplane on standby for spur-of-the-moment weekends in paradise.)
With the heat of rum punch starting to surge through my veins, I’m thinking back to how Will managed to wear down my defences early in our courtship. Gotta say, his level of intelligence mixed with his West Philly grit was compelling.
We each understood where the other came from, and there was no need to offer explanations. He also had a unique way of presenting an argument. On our very first date we were sitting at a restaurant having a fierce debate over dinner. Will pointed to his glass as a visual component to understanding perception.
“You see that glass? It’s to the right from where you’re sitting.” He waited for me to agree, and I did. “But from where I’m sitting, it’s on my left.”
I had never thought about things that way at the tender age of 23. The point he was conveying was that learning to understand someone else’s perception by putting yourself in their position is a powerful skill. Nobody around me at the time was thinking that deeply. I admit, it felt great to be courted by the most skilled man at courtship on the planet. But the greater magnet for me was my sense that Will would challenge me in substantial ways.
He was never hesitant to take on the status quos in Hollywood set up for black men — and women of colour as well. He broke the rules that were entrenched by Hollywood’s ignorance of the broad reach of black talent; he broke rules so effortlessly it would set him in a league of his own. And you know what I found to be so gangster about that? He did it with a smile. I respected that … a lot. I also respected that he could make me laugh like no other. He could sometimes, only sometimes, be hilariously silly. I did not find him as consistently funny as others. BUT when he did make me laugh, he knew it was genuine and made a sport out of having me literally (and I mean literally) rolling on the floor.
Will was a guy who could be comfortable in the ‘hood or at the White House and everywhere in between. He had the ability to spread his arms wide and promise you that the world was his oyster, and he was going to give you all the pearls it had to offer.
Worthy by Jada Pinkett Smith (Harper Collins) is on sale in New Zealand today.
Written by: Hadley Freeman
© The Times of London
