Jada Pinkett Smith Reflects on Tupac Kiss, Oscars Slap, and Will Smith
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Jada Pinkett Smith is baring it all ahead of her new book, Worthy. On Friday night, Pinkett Smith sat down with Today‘s Hoda Kotb and discussed her “complicated marriage” to Will Smith, the infamous Oscar’s slap, and her healing journey in an NBC News primetime special that aired Friday. The actress also shared insight into her relationship with Tupac Shakur.
Pinkett Smith remembers Tupac
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Growing up in Baltimore, Pinkett Smith talked about dealing drugs at the age of 14 while also attending the Baltimore School for the Arts. “Multiple worlds at one time. I’m used to that,” said Pinkett Smith, adding that she learned how to be in “all kinds of environments” from her grandmother.
In 1986, she met rapper Tupac Shakur at school. “Pac was new. It was my sophomore year, and he looked over, and he saw me, and he just targeted me,” Pinkett Smith said, then added her first impression of Shakur was that he was “charismatic” and had a “beautiful smile.”
“He had a little peanut head… He was just this happy, bouncy, energetic, just full of life, vibrant, you know? And I was like, ‘Whoa.’”
She also shared an anecdote of their kiss on her back porch, something she’s previously talked about in a 2015 interview with Howard Stern. “We both pulled back like ‘What the hell?'” Pinkett Smith laughed, telling Kotb, “It was not for either one of us.”
After her mother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris “put her foot down” and convinced her daughter to stop dealing, Pinkett Smith eventually made her way to Hollywood.
As both her and Shakur’s careers took off, the two remained close friends until his death in a Las Vegas drive-by shooting in 1996.
Her big break and meeting Will Smith
After dropping out of college, Pinkett Smith headed to Los Angeles and landed parts on TV shows like Doogie Houser, M.D. and 21 Jump Street, before producer Debbie Allen cast her as a series regular in the Cosby Show spinoff, A Different World.
According to the actress, after that, “I blew up.”
While auditioning for a role on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Pinkett Smith met the show’s star, Will Smith.
“I was like, OK, he’s hanging out here, you know, fishing, you know what I mean? Seeing all the pretty girls coming out the audition room. And I was like, ‘Don’t talk to me unless you trying to get me a role,’” she said of her first impression of him.
Although it would be until three years later, in 1994, that they would start talking, her mother didn’t approve of the relationship as Smith was married to Sheree Zampino, with whom he had a son, at the time.
“‘Y’all hang up that phone. You don’t need to be talking to no married man,’” Pinkett Smith recalled her mother saying. “So, I was like, ‘Will, I’m so sorry, but my mom says please don’t call me anymore.’”
When Smith and Zampino divorced in 1995, he called up Pinkett Smith and they soon began dating.
“I knew on the first date,” she said. “He was a different kind of guy than I was used to dating. Extremely intelligent, which I really liked because he kept me on my toes. He was such a dreamer.”
In 1997, Pinkett Smith discovered she was pregnant and they married on New Year’s Eve the same year.
“There’s no way I was going to have a baby and us not be married,” she told Kotb. The pair are now parents to son Jaden, 25, Willow, 22. Along with Trey, Will’s son with ex-wife Zampino, they are a family of five.
Pinkett Smith said she struggled with suicidal thoughts
Although her and Smith appeared to be living the perfect Hollywood life, Pinkett Smith said that as she approached her 40th birthday in 2011, her began to struggle with her mental health.
“I’d been struggling with depression for a long time,” she said. “When I started to get into my late 30’s and then hit 40, I had a terrible wall.”
“You start to think that everybody’s better without you,” she added, then said she had devised “a plan for an accident so that it doesn’t look like suicide.”
“As morbid as it might sound, when I would come up with a plan, it made me feel like, ‘OK, you got a plan, so you’re good,'” she explained.
To combat her depression, she tried “a plant-based psychedelic” and said the unconventional remedy helped her feel as though a veil had been lifted.
Addressing the rumors: ‘None of it’s true‘
Pinkett Smith and Smith have faced numerous rumors throughout their 26-year marriage including gossip that they were swingers, were in an open marriage or that they were both secretly gay.
“I mean, a million things were out there,” Kotb pointed out before asking the actress if any of the rumors were true and if they bothered her.
“No. You know, that’s part of it. I would say that none of that’s true. I definitely can understand why there’d be misunderstandings,” Pinkett Smith said, “But none of it’s true.”
She also addressed the Red Table Talk with her husband during which they discussed her “entanglement” with rapper August Alsina. While many viewers assumed Pinkett Smith had blindsided Smith on the show, she cleared things up with Kotb and said he knew about the relationship prior to the episode and had requested to appear on it.
The Oscar’s slap
“First of all, I’m really shocked because, mind you, I’m not there… We haven’t called each other husband and wife in a long time,” Pinkett Smith said when addressing the infamous moment Smith slapped Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars. “I’m like, ‘What is going on right now?'”
Pinkett Smith said she was “really worried for Will,” who later won an Oscar that night for his role in King Richard.
In a previous interview with People, Pinkett Smith said she hadn’t spoken with Chris Rock since Will Smith’s Oscars slap incident, though she did say he came to her right after and tried to apologize. “Chris came down to the end of the stage and tried to apologize to me,” she recalled. “He said, ‘I didn’t mean you any harm.’ I said, ‘I can’t talk about this now, Chris. This is some old shit.’”
She said that she did not realize Smith had hit Rock until his publicist told her, “Chris has left the building and he’s not going to press charges.”
During Friday’s interview, the actress said, “These kinds of moments can do two things. They can amplify love or they can really make you bitter, angry, resentful. We’ve chosen to really look at this moment and heal.”
Pinkett Smith and Smith have be separated since 2016
Friday’s interview comes several days after Today shared a snippet of the conversation, where Pinkett Smith explained why she and Smith have decided to keep their separation private, despite being apart for six years.
“I think, just not being ready yet. Still trying to figure out, between the two of us, how to be in partnership. And in regards to, how do we present that to people,” she said in the preview. “And we hadn’t figured that out.”
Pinkett Smith also said there were “a lot of things” that led to the dissolution of the relationship, explaining that, by 2016, “we were just exhausted with trying. I think we were still both kind of stuck in our fantasy of what we thought the other person should be.” (Rolling Stone put together a timeline of the couple’s relationship and marriage.)
However, during the NBC special, the actress said she “made a promise that there will never be a reason for us to get a divorce.”
“We don’t want to,” she continued. “We love our family. And we love each other. It’s more of a life partnership. Now, 10 years from now, Hoda, who knows? Right now, what we’re focused on, which has been so beautiful, is deep healing. Because of everything that’s transpired. What happens after that, I don’t know yet.”
When Kotb asked if it was possible there will be a full reconciliation, Pinkett Smith joked, “He’s getting old!” She added, “Who’s going to be there for him, Hoda? It’s going to be me.”
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