GIRL POWER TRIP
Jada Pinkett Smith dishes on women’s film roles and sharing the spotlight with her kids
JADA Pinkett Smith could name a hundred reasons why she wanted to make “Girls Trip,” the new raunchy comedy about four BFFs running wild in New Orleans.
But one hit particularly close to home: the dance-off, which finds the crew sporting wigs and sunglasses and getting into formation.
“We would dance-battle all the time,” Pinkett Smith tells The Post of her teenage years in Baltimore. Compared with the freestyling she threw down in the day, the 45-yearold adds, the movie’s choreography was “pretty easy.”
“This movie, it’s our culture. It reflects how we grew up,” she says. “And the dance battles were an important part of that.”
She’s been on TVand in films for more than 25 years — playing such roles as a male-strip-club impresario in “Magic Mike XXL,” the ultra-fab supervillainess Fish Mooney on “Gotham” and a sympathetic bank robber in “Set It Off.”
But she says she’d never been offered anything quite like “Girls Trip,” which features four women (herself, Regina Hall, Queen Latifah and Tiffany Haddish) not just behaving badly, but having a rollicking good time getting away with it, too.
“It breaks that stereotype that women are supposed to behave a certain way,” says Pinkett Smith, sitting in the burnished marble lobby of the Park Hyatt Hotel in Midtown. “And it was grounded in really beautiful messaging.”
Pinkett Smith carries her lithe, 5-foot frame with the poise and confidence of someone much taller. With her full-skirted frock and Frida Kahlo-esque braided hairdo, she looks like a more fashionable version of her “Girls Trip” character, Lisa, a party girl-turned-buttoned-up single mother who frets about leaving her two young children with their grandmother while she’s off with her friends.
That’s something else Pinkett Smith could relate to. “They always came with me,” she says of her children with actor husband Will Smith. “That’s why they’re homeschooled.”
But she hasn’t been able to shield Jaden, now 19, and Willow, 16, from criticism about their fashion statements and often head-scratching tweets.
“Anyone who has anything mean to say about a child — that’s really an issue that [that person] needs to take up with [him or herself],” she says.
“I think, with social media, children these days have a different way of looking at things, just because they deal with what other people think about them daily with their own Instagrams,” she says. “It’s something Willow and Jaden have dealt with for a long time, so they just process it differently.”
With her kids nearly grown, she was able to leave them while making “Girls Trip.” Filming it involved “a lot of hanging out,” especially with Latifah, with whom Pinkett Smith starred 21 years ago in “Set It Off.”
These days, she says, she’s more interested in sunbathing on a beach or chatting with friends over a great glass of wine, although she’s considering a getaway to Rio de Janeiro or an African safari, maybe even with her co-stars.
“I’m definitely looking forward to a vacation,” she says. “It may be a girls’ trip — I’ll have to see who’s available.”