Jada Pinkett Smith said she was shocked when Will Smith referred to her as his “wife” after slapping Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars, given that they have been “separated for seven years”.
Last year’s Academy Awards show was thrown into chaos when Will, 55, walked on stage and struck presenter Rock across the face for a joke he made about Pinkett Smith’s shaved head, which is due to alopecia.
“Keep my wife’s name out of your f***ing mouth,” Will yelled at Rock while walking back to his seat next to Pinkett Smith. Minutes later, he went on to win the Oscar for Best Actor for his role in the sports drama King Richard.
“First of all, I’m really shocked... We haven’t called each other husband and wife in a long time,” Pinkett Smith, 52, told NBC’s Hoda Kotb during the network’s primetime special.
“I’m like, ‘What is going on right now? Keep my wife’s name out of your mouth?’ I’m really worried for Will because I don’t know what’s going on,” the former Red Table Talk host said of her reaction to the altercation.
In a separate interview with People in promotion of her forthcoming memoir, Worthy, Pinkett Smith revealed that while the two aren’t legally divorced, they have been living separately since 2016.
The couple got married in 1997 and share 25-year-old Jaden and 22-year-old Willow.
“We’re still figuring it out,” she told the magazine of the state of their marriage. “We just got deep love for each other and we are going to figure out what that looks like for us.”
Jada Pinkett Smith, Chris Rock and Will Smith— (Getty Images)
She further shared her immediate response to the incident, admitting that she initially thought it was a skit.
“I was like, ‘There’s no way that Will hit him’,” Pinkett Smith recalled. “It wasn’t until Will started to walk back to his chair that I even realised it wasn’t a skit.”
Once they were alone backstage, she remembered the first words she said to him, were: “Are you okay?”
In his first late-night interview following the debacle, Will told The Daily Show host Trevor Noah that he was “going through something that night”, attributing his actions to “bottled rage”.
The Men in Black actor later apologised to the Academy and Rock for his “unacceptable behaviour”.
The physical assault resulted in Will being banned from Academy events for 10 years and saw the Oscars put in place new crisis measures for the ceremony that took place this year.
Worthy is out on 17 October.
