Jada Pinkett Smith reveals THAT Oscars slap made her relationship with Will ‘deeper than romance’
Jada Pinkett Smith has revealed how the dynamics of her marriage with Will Smith changed after he slapped Chris Rock at last year’s Oscars.
The pair had secretly separated six years prior to the incident, with Jada, 52, confessing: ‘I’m not thinking in a million years he’s getting up on stage and it has anything to do with me!’
Speaking to Red magazine, she added: ‘That’s when your relationship gets deeper than romance or all the c**p that comes with marriage.
‘I was just really concerned about Will. And I realised in that moment that, as challenging as our relationship can be, I’m always going to be by his side, no matter what.’
At the 94th Academy Awards, Will strode onto the stage and slapped Chris after the comedian cracked a joke about Jada looking like ‘G.I. Jane’ because of her bald head when she had recently revealed that was suffering from alopecia.
Struggles: Jada Pinkett Smith has admitted she was ‘really concerned’ about Will Smith after he slapped Chris Rock at last year’s Oscars
While she and Will were living separately at the time, Jada explained that they’ve always had each other’s backs, more so now that they’re apart.
She revealed: ‘Us pulling at each other to love each other so that we could feel a certain way about ourselves, to then separate and find our emotional independence, to then meet each other in the middle.
‘Learning how to show up for ourselves is showing up for the other person. It’s been a deep learning process in how to love.’
While Jada has been open about the complexities of their marriage, she revealed that she prefers not to use ‘conventional’ relationship titles to describe their union.
She explained: ‘I try to stay away from conventional terms like “marriage” because people have a very specific idea of it and I’m not in the business of trying to change that.
‘I like spending time with me and I like spending time with my family and that’s it. I have no desire to do anything else but that.’
The desire not to pursue the conventional came from the early days of their romance, with Jada confessing she was under no illusion that Hollywood wouldn’t have an impact on their relationship.
She revealed: ‘I wasn’t going to go into a marriage in my early 20s, in Tinseltown – Will being one of the most sought-after actors in the world – thinking we were exempt from having to confront inevitable temptations… I didn’t want to play that game.
‘So I was just like, “This is where we have to have a level of friendship; this is where we have to be honest with one another.” That friendship has been the core of what’s helped us get through some of the most difficult times.’
Ouch: At the 94th Academy Awards, Will strode onto the stage and slapped Chris after the comedian cracked a joke about Jada looking like ‘G.I. Jane’ because of her bald head
Jada was also focusing on carving out her own career and not being reduced to being called ‘Will Smith’s wife’, a label she found ‘annoying’.
In later years the focus has been on finding balance in her personal life and career, with Jada revealing ‘I had to get really solid on what my priority was.’
She continued: ‘At the end of the day, that was my family. That doesn’t fit into what makes a powerful, independent woman? Leave a woman to decide for herself what is important to her.
‘It’s a lot of personal reconciling that helps us get that balance – recognising that we’re not here to be everything to everybody, and that’s okay.’
Despite her best efforts though, Jada revealed she feels misunderstood and that’s why she felt compelled to write her memoir, Worthy.
While she spent 18 months writing the book, it appears to be performing poorly on some major book bestseller lists.
Jada released the book on October 17, and it managed to nab the number three spot on Amazon’s charts for the week of October 22, which lists the Top 20 most sold & most read books of the week.
She finished just behind Britney Spears’ even buzzier memoir The Woman In Me and David Grann’s Killers Of The Flower Moon, which returned to the top of the charts thanks to interest in Martin Scorsese’s Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro–starring film of the same name.
But on Amazon’s main bestsellers list, Worthy had plummeted to just number 81 as of Tuesday, according to Newsweek.
By Wednesday evening it had dropped three more spots to number 84.
Notably, the main bestsellers chart only tracks sales, whereas Jada’s book placed in the top three on the online retailers charts that track both sales and the number of Kindle readers and Audible listeners working through the book, suggesting that more people were interested in her memoir than were willing to shell out for a copy they could own.
The December issue of Red is now on sale now.
Supportive: While she and Will were living separately at the time, Jada explained that they’ve always had each other’s backs, more so now that they’re apart (pictured in 2014)
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