In a year of what’s seemed to be a constant string of celebrity divorces, this week one actor made the shock admission of her separation.
Although it’s not a legal divorce, Jada Pinkett-Smith revealed she and Will Smith have been secretly separated since 2016.
She told People: “We’re still figuring it out. We’ve been doing some really heavy-duty work together. We just got deep love for each other, and we are going to figure out what that looks like for us.”
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So yes, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that when the Men in Black star landed that slap on Chris Rock’s face, he wasn’t actually ‘with’ his ‘wife’.
Let’s recap, shall we?
Back in 2022, Will supplied us with memes and shock as he strode on stage at the 94th Academy Awards.
The actor was fuming with the comedian’s ‘joke’ that Jada, who rocks a shaved head, looked like ‘G.I. Jane’.
She’d recently revealed she was suffering from alopecia but at first, a lot of viewers thought the slap was a bit.
But as Will sat back down afterwards, he yelled to the host: “Keep my wife’s name out your f**king mouth,” although I don’t think many of us have forgotten that.
Considering they’d been separated for six years by that point, Jada has since admitted she was shocked by what was happening and also initially thought ‘this is a skit’.
She told People: “I was like, ‘There’s no way that Will hit him'. It wasn’t until Will started to walk back to his chair that I even realized it wasn’t a skit.”
Once they were alone after, Jada said the first thing she said to him was ‘are you okay’.
She also unpacked the famed moment in her interview with Hoda Kotb on the Today show.
The Red Table Talk host said: “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. I'm like, what is going on right now?”
She added that in the moment she was ‘really worried for Will’ because ‘I don’t know what’s going on’.
Jada also revealed that Chris leant over the stage afterwards and told her: “Jada, I meant you no harm.”
The actor told Kotb about the separation: “By the time we got to 2016, we were just exhausted with trying. I think we were both kind of just still stuck in our fantasy of what we thought the other person should be.”
And by the time the Oscars slap came around, Jada and Will were living ‘completely separate lives’.
Topics: Oscars, Sex and Relationships, Will Smith, Celebrity
Jess Battison