“We were just exhausted with trying.”
After intense speculation about their relationship, Jada Pinkett Smith has finally set the record straight about her 25-year marriage to fellow actor Will Smith. The pair have been separated for seven years, and after that announcement first set the Internet ablaze after her interview with The TODAY Show on Oct. 11, she’s telling more of the story in her upcoming memoir, Worthy, and in an interview with our own Katie Couric for her podcast, Next Question.
While the couple may no longer be romantically involved, Pinkett Smith added that they’re still legally married. In her conversation with Katie, she described their current relationship as a “beautiful life partnership.”
“We want to share this lifetime together, and we’re still figuring out what that’s gonna look like,” she told us.
This revelation is among other intimate admissions in Worthy. The book also details her humble beginnings growing up in Baltimore, her deep bond with the late rapper Tupac Shakur, and her rise to fame.
Here’s a look at Pinkett Smith’s fascinating conversation with Katie, along with more of what she’s said about her relationship with Will during her latest round of media appearances.
Are Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith still married?
Yes, but it’s complicated. In a soon-to-be-aired special, Pinkett Smith revealed that she and Smith decided to start living separate lives in 2016.
“Why it fractured — that’s a lot of things,” Pinkett Smith said of her relationship with Smith. “I think by the time we got to 2016, we were just exhausted with trying.”
While Pinkett Smith has considered a legal divorce, she added that she hasn’t been able to bring herself to actually do it. “I made a promise that there will never be a reason for us to get a divorce. We will work through whatever,” she said.
The actress says that the couple’s relationship is very much a work in progress, though she maintains that neither has had an affair. “We eliminated the chance of betrayal,” Pinkett Smith told PEOPLE. “It’s like, ‘Let’s talk about it. Let’s work through it together. Let’s be in partnership. Let’s not keep each other in the dark.’”
What else has Jada Pinkett Smith said about her marriage?
This isn’t the first time Pinkett Smith spoke candidly about her marriage to Smith. The couple, who share three kids, have long faced gossip as one of Hollywood’s most well-known celebrity couples.
After initially denying the fling, the actress shared that she began an “entanglement,” with singer August Alsina when the couple were “separated amicably.”
“You and I were going through a very difficult time,” Pinkett Smith said to her husband during a 2020 episode of her talk show Red Table Talk. “I was done with you,” he replied.
The actress explained that the reason why they didn’t tell the public was because the two weren’t ready themselves. “How do we present that to people? And we hadn’t figured that out,” she said.
Still, Pinkett Smith told Katie that a lot of people at the time confused “entanglement” — a term she picked from her Buddhist readings — with cheating, though she said this couldn’t be further from the truth.
“People really thought that entanglement was a new word for affair,” she said. “An affair can be an entanglement for sure — it’s just that my situation was not an affair,” she added. “In the book, I talk about how, in 2016, Will and I were not together. We had gone our separate ways and we were both living separate lives and on our way to divorce, so we were done.”
What did Jada Pinkett Smith say about Will Smith’s infamous Oscars slap?
At first, Pinkett Smith says she was just as confused as the rest of us when her husband slapped host Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards after the comedian made a joke about her shaved head. (She lives with a disease known as alopecia, which causes hair loss.)
“Chris slipped the shot and it looked like it was a skit,” she told Katie. “Then when Will turned around and walked back down the stage, that’s when I realized, ‘Oh, something is going on here.’ But I still wasn’t quite sure what was happening.”
She told Katie she didn’t realize it was serious until the Will’s publicist came over to the couple during the commercial break to inform them that Chris left the building but wasn’t going to press charges. “I looked to Will and I said, ‘You hit Chris, you actually hit Chris.’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ And that’s when I knew — I was like, ‘Well, I’m his wife now. We gonna get through this storm together.'”
She also revealed that the first thing she said to her husband once they were alone after the show was, “Are you OK?”
Smith was subsequently banned by the Academy for 10 years over the slap. The actor later apologized to Rock, saying he was “deeply remorseful” for his actions. But it appears the two have yet to make amends: Rock appeared to call Smith’s recorded apology a “hostage video” while performing in London during a comedy set.
This is just one of the many struggles Pinkett Smith has had to navigate, not to mention the ones she’s personally endured. She has battled depression throughout her career and even contemplated suicide at one point before finding some relief in a psychedelic drug called Ayahuasca.
Through all of these ups and downs, she says Smith has been at her side. Of how they first got together, she said, “Will called me up one day and said, ’Hit me when you get to L.A.’ …And I was like, ‘Whoa. Okay.’ And so when I got to L.A., I called him. I haven’t been able to get rid of him since.”
How’s Will Smith responding to his wife’s comments about their marriage status?
In an Instagram post on Sunday, Smith appeared to respond to his wife’s confessions about their relationship (and the subsequent buzz) with a video that showed him falling asleep on a boat as his phone goes off, with the caption, “notifications off.” (Pinkett Smith commented on the post with two laughing emojis.)
Though Smith hasn’t commented directly on Pinkett Smith’s remarks, he has shared his thoughts about her memoir, calling it a wake-up call. “When you’ve been with someone for more than half of your life, a sort of emotional blindness sets in, and you can all too easily lose your sensitivity to their hidden nuances and subtle beauties,” Smith said in an email to The New York Times.
Pinkett Smith recently told She Knows that Will was one of few people who read her memoir before its publication. “Will has read the entire book,” Pinkett Smith told them. “Will is super happy and very surprised. He’s like, ‘Man, you think you know somebody.’ He really enjoyed the book.”
During an episode of the podcast “On Purpose with Jay Shetty,” Shetty read a letter from Smith saying, “If I had read this book 30 years ago, I definitely would’ve hugged you more.” It appeared to move Pinkett Smith because she responded by saying in part, “That’s beautiful,” she said. “That’s why I can’t divorce that joker.”
