What’s the behind that
It was a jaw-dropping moment that stunned millions of TV viewers. Now, as it’s revealed that Will Smith and the wife whose honour he was defending had been separated for six years, all of Hollywood is asking...
IT WAS dubbed ‘the slap heard around the world’, the moment last year when – seconds after the camera caught Will Smith laughing at Oscar host Chris Rock’s joke about his wife’s shaved head as she sat beside him – the actor bounded on stage and hit the comic hard across the face. It was a display of outrageous, entitled behaviour by one of Hollywood’s biggest stars – and minutes away from collecting the Best Actor award, too. But Smith’s one saving grace, many felt, was that he’d been defending the honour of a beloved wife from mockery over her alopecia.
‘Keep my wife’s name out of your f***ing mouth,’ Smith repeatedly bellowed as Rock rubbed his face, later bursting into tears during his Oscars acceptance speech as he rambled on about the terrible abuse that stars have to put up with and how ‘love will make you do crazy things’.
Now, however, Jada Pinkett Smith – whom he married in 1997 – has suggested that Smith’s vigorous display of spousal loyalty wasn’t anything like what it seemed.
In an interview this week, the actress revealed that their supposedly long and happy marriage actually disintegrated way back in 2016 – six years before the Oscars incident – and they had since been living ‘completely separate lives’.
Although they didn’t divorce on paper, it was a divorce in practice, she told a sycophantic TV interviewer. This from a woman who once claimed that ‘it’s too hard to be in a pretend marriage’.
Asked why they chose to live a lie for so long, she said that it came down to ‘just not being ready yet... still trying to figure out between the two of us how to be in partnership and... how do we present that to people?
‘I made a promise that there will never be a reason for us to get a divorce. We will work through whatever and I just haven’t been able to break that promise,’ she said.
What on earth is going on with Hollywood’s most preposterous power couple?
The short answer is that Pinkett Smith has a new book to plug and, not being as big a star as her husband, she needed something dramatic to reveal in it.
Even something that entails contradicting herself after years of dismissing rumours that her 26-year marriage to Will Smith – which has produced two children – was a sham.
In her autobiography, Worthy, she also claims that Chris Rock asked her out when he thought she was getting divorced and that she initially thought that Smith’s decision to hit Rock at the Oscars was only a ‘skit’.
The memoir’s publisher, Dey Street Books, describes it as a ‘rollercoaster ride from the depths of suicidal depression to the heights of personal rediscovery and the celebration of authentic feminine power’.
However, given the new revelations about her marriage, which has long been plagued by rumours about infidelity and their sexuality, it has to be asked if anything the couple say can be taken at face value.
After all, Will Smith wrote his own memoir in 2021, a work that was dubbed ‘brave and inspiring’ and gave the impression that they were in a deep and strong relationship. And in a TV interview last year he said: ‘There’s never been infidelity in our marriage. Jada and I talk about everything, and we have never surprised one another with anything ever.’
True, his estranged wife has herself sent out conflicting signals over the years about whether she’s had other lovers during their marriage, brushing away her romance with a friend of her son Jaden, 25, who was decades younger as an ‘entanglement’.
The couple appear to share the somewhat unorthodox view that infidelity only exists when a couple aren’t honest with each other about their sexual partners.
But Pinkett Smith, 52, has yet to say exactly why their marriage ended. ‘That’s a lot of things. By the time we got to 2016, we were just exhausted with trying,’ she told the NBC interviewer.
But she hasn’t been short on the couple’s trademark incomprehensible waffle in interviews promoting her book.
‘We’ve been doing some really heavy-duty work together,’ she told People magazine.
‘We just got deep love for each other and we are going to figure out what that looks like.’
The daughter of a heroin-addict mother and alcoholic father, she says she became a drug dealer on the streets of Baltimore, where she grew up, before studying acting.
She married 55-year-old Smith in 1997, the same year the actor and rapper shot to Hollywood stardom in the sci-fi comedy Men In Black. He was married to his first wife,