After sharing various intimate details about her marriage to Will while promoting the release of her memoir Worthy, Jada seems to be backtracking on claims that the pair have called it quits.
In her latest interview on the US Today show, the Girls Trip actress, 55, says that people had initially “missed” the point that she was trying to make - and that she and her husband are “working very hard” to save their marriage, reports news.com.au.
“We are working very hard at bringing our relationship, yes, bringing our relationship back together … back to a life partnership, yes,” she informed host Hoda Kotb.
“Husband-wife marriage for me, for my healing process. I came into that with very specific ideas, right? Very specific ideas that were blocks. To me just seeing Will to who he is. He can’t be this perfect idealised husband.
“I have to be able to accept him for the human he is. He accepts me for the human that I am, and we want to love each other there. We really have been working hard.”
Hoda Kotb and Jada Pinkett Smith on Wednesday, September 13, 2023. Photo / Getty Images
The Red Table Talk host’s revelation appeared to shock Kotb, who responded confusedly: “Oh! OK. Well … I didn’t know that.”
“That’s the point I was trying to tell you,” Pinkett Smith went on. “You totally missed that. That’s the whole thing.”
Kotb then asked Pinkett Smith: “There might not be a divorce, in theory, anymore?” to which she replied: “Yeah. No. We really have been working hard.”
The host then pushed further in an attempt to straighten up the facts.
“So, wait. Just so I’m 100 per cent sure … You were divorced not on paper?”
“Right,” Pinkett Smith admitted.
Will Smith, left, and Jada Pinkett Smith arrive at the premiere of "Emancipation," Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2022, at the Regency Village Theatre in Los Angeles. Photo / AP
The follow-up interview with Kotb comes just a few days after Hollywood was rocked by the news that Jada and Will had not lived together for seven years.
After originally breaking the news of her split with People last week, Pinkett Smith revealed more details about the separation with Kotb on NBC News, sharing why the marriage fell apart.
“By the time we got to 2016, we were just exhausted with trying,” the actress confessed.
“I think we were both still stuck in our fantasy of what we thought the other person should be.”
“I mean, a million things were out there,” Pinkett Smith told the host.
“No. You know, that’s part of it. I would say that none of that’s true. I definitely can understand why there’d be misunderstandings,” she shared, “but none of it’s true.”
Smith, 55, confessed in an email to the New York Times that his wife’s series of bombshells “kind of woke him up” to the fact that she is more “resilient, clever and compassionate than [he’d] understood”, and that he’d developed “emotional blindness” to her “hidden nuances”.
“When you’ve been with someone for more than half of your life a sort of emotional blindness sets in, and you can all too easily lose your sensitivity to their hidden nuances and subtle beauties,” the Oscar-winner told the Times.
