A year and a half ago, actor Will Smith slapped comedian Chris Rock on the Oscar stage after he made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s shaved head. When he returned to his seat, he shouted twice, “Don’t put my wife’s name in your damn mouth!” (“Keep my wife’s name out your fucking mouth!”). Now the US actress is revealing a surprising detail about her marriage. Because at the time of the Oscar scandal in 2022, the Smiths had long since separated.
In an interview with People magazine, she says of the status quo of her marriage, which began in 1997: “We’re still figuring it out.” She further reveals that they were separated for six years before the Oscars. And yet: “We’ve really done a lot together. We just have a deep love for each other and we’ll figure out what that looks like for us.”
Jada Pinkett Smith also commented on the shocking incident itself, as a result of which the newly crowned Oscar winner Will Smith was banned from all Academy events for ten years. “I thought, ‘This is a skit.'” Like many people who watched the incident live on television, she didn’t believe it was real at first. “I thought, ‘There’s no way Will hit him,'” she recalls. “It wasn’t until Will went back to his chair that I realized it wasn’t a skit.” When they were alone after the show, she asked him, “Are you okay?”
The answer to that is still a work in progress. Pinkett Smith has written more about her difficult childhood and depression in her new book “Worthy”, which will be published on October 17th.
