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“I’m on my train,” says Jada Pinkett Smith. “And I’m really happy.” After a week of revelations and speculation surrounding the state of her marriage to Will Smith, the actor opened up to Arianna Huffington about the rumors, the Oscars slap, and her decades-long journey of self-healing, as part of Vanity Fair and Creative Artists Agency’s “Conversations at PAC NYC” series. The pair took the stage for a conversation at the Perelman Performing Arts Center the night before Pinkett Smith’s highly anticipated memoir, Worthy, hit stands.
“One thing Will really came to terms with and was very clear—really, many years ago, he was like, ‘I get it, you’ve been on my train,’” Pinkett Smith told Huffington. “He really wanted me to get on my train, so that we can hop on each other’s train back and forth. But he really understood it was time for me to have my own train.”
To the surprise of the world, Pinkett Smith has been riding on her own for quite some time. She shares in her memoir that she and her husband have been “living separate lives” since 2016. Though the two have been separated for the better part of a decade, and Pinkett Smith says there were absolutely points in her life when she tried to “get away” from the King Richard star, the author also told Huffington that she never considered leaving her marriage.
“Will and I have gone through such an intense journey together to really learn what love is about,” Pinkett Smith said during their conversation. “That’s what being in Relationships is about, learning how to love. We think we come into relationships knowing how to love. You know, like, Oh, I found my prince charming. He knows how to love me. He’s going to make sure I’m happy. And as you go on in life and marriage and your partnerships, for me, personally, I had to realize it wasn’t Will’s job to make me happy.”
In Worthy, Pinkett Smith reveals that she had a nervous breakdown a year before meeting Smith during an audition to play his girlfriend on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, a part she lost to Nia Long. “I had gone into my marriage really not in a great place,” she told Huffington. When Smith came along, “I’m feeling so good. I’m like, I’m cured, I’m cured. I don’t need to go to therapy. I don’t need this Prozac. I found my new Prozac, and his name is Will Smith.” At the time, she believed that it was Smith’s job to make her happy—a belief that took her a “long time” to shake.
“I would get so disappointed when he didn’t,” she said. “And I had no self-responsibility. I wasn’t taking care of myself in a way that I needed to.” Through years of self-work, therapy, and ayahuasca retreats, Pinkett Smith learned to love herself in a way where she no longer needed Smith to “save” her, she said.
From Peter Cooper.
“It’s on the back of this book,” Pinkett Smith said. “‘A queen is her own savior. Her magic is quiet, potent, and mysterious.’ [That is] me coming into my sense of self-worth. I can save myself. And now all my partner needs to do is participate. Participate in my happiness—not be my happiness, and not be the one to provide my happiness, but help me enhance it. We’re going to enhance it together, but you can’t save me from my misery.”
Despite what Pinkett Smith may have led us to believe, she and Smith are very much still partners, she added. “Now we’re in this beautiful place,” she shared. And the catalyst that brought them to that beautiful place? The infamous Oscars slap.
“After the Oscars, that’s when we did some really deep work together,” Pinkett Smith shared. “When I was sitting at the Oscars, it clicked in. As soon as I was like, Oh snap, you hit Chris [Rock], I was like, I’m riding with you. I didn’t come into this place as your wife, but I’m leaving here as your wife, because we got a storm we’re going to have to deal with together. I am not going to leave your side.”
“I just knew. I said, I am not going to be able to get away from this dude. I really love him. And that was the moment. It was like an emotional crisis. It took an emotional crisis for me to really see, like, Yo, we in this for this lifetime. So that’s where we are.”
While the details of their Relationship are still fuzzy, their bond is strong enough that Smith, whose own autobiography, Will, came out in 2021, was fully supportive of Pinkett Smith sharing her side of the story via her memoir. “Will was just like, ‘Whatever. Go ahead,’” she told Huffington. “He was like, ‘I want you to share. You haven’t been able to have your authentic voice through and through. I’m going to be comfortable with whatever you want to share. I trust you.’” She sent him a copy of her memoir to read before it went to the editor. “He didn’t change a word,” she said, to Huffington’s disbelief. “He changed nothing. I was really grateful. He really wanted me to have my voice and to have my story.”
Of course, Pinkett Smith discussed subjects other than her marriage as well. She talked about her spiritual journey, her life-changing encounter with Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh, and experiencing the “power of silence.” She shared how ayahuasca has been instrumental in her self-healing journey, and how it forces you to “sit there in your stuff.” She discussed breaking the cycle of generational trauma with her mother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris, and the healing that came from having frank conversations about everything from their relationship to pregnancy and motherhood. But the most surprising and salient observations of the night were related to how she’s maintained and sustained a 20-plus-year relationship through good times and bad.
“I had to go through everything,” Pinkett Smith said. “That’s one of the reasons I’m so glad that I didn’t go on that angry impulse of just, I’m divorcing you. I’m sick of you. I knew I had to get my stuff together. I recognized that.”
To be clear, Smith had his own work to do as well, particularly after the Oscars slap. “I knew that I would be by his side but that I couldn’t do the work for him,” Pinkett Smith said. “That was the first time I realized that. Because my codependency wanted to do the work for him. But I was like, I’m going to be here, but you’re going to have to do this.”
For Pinkett Smith, some of that work came from letting go of the idea that she was supposed to have “this perfect marriage,” a concept she believes the public is having trouble processing right now. “People are having a really hard time, and I understand,” she said. “Because I was mad too. I was pissed. I was like, Man, this is supposed to be like this and this and this. So I understand why everybody else is upset when we run into what’s real…. It’s like, Nah, I’m sorry. We’re out here with the same struggle as you all got. And it’s okay.”
When it comes to the mixed public response to her recent revelations, particularly from Black media outlets and social media users, Pinkett Smith is also trying to approach that from a place of understanding. “I think that’s one small community,” she said, speaking to criticism she’s received from Black bystanders online. “I have so much support from my Black community. It’s very complex in relationship to how we as Black women are expected to uphold our men in a certain way. It’s a really complex dynamic. And then there not being a lot of room in the world in general as far as the Black woman’s voice when it comes to her personal journey. A Black woman’s voice is very much welcomed when she’s coming to fight for someone else. When she is advocating for herself or just wants to share her experiences in an honest way, it’s really difficult.”
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