Jada Pinkett Smith is “grateful” for the Oscars slap, the actor and talkshow host told Jess Cagle on Sirius XM’s “The Jess Cagle Show.”
“I’m grateful for it all,” Smith said, emphasizing that she’s a “real believer” that everything happens for a reason and that it’s all about one’s mindset. “So, when painful situations occur, I always know that there’s an opportunity for a big blessing. And so, in that particular circumstance, I really focused on the blessings. I really focused on what is being asked of me, from that space of love and connection, what is being asked of me.”
When Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards, Smith knew her husband was going to enter the “dark night of the soul that he hadn’t entered before” as the public turned against him. She also knew she would be challenged to stand by him.
“Everybody wants to ride in the limo,” Smith said. “I’d been by his side when [he was] in the limo. Now I had to be by his side in the hoopty, you know?”
In Smith’s memoir “Worthy,” she refers to the Oscars slap as the “holy slap.” During her interview with Cagle, the actor doubled down on that descriptor, saying, “The holy joke. The holy Slap. Holy lessons.”
Smith referred to the time after the Oscars incident as a period of “huge, huge reflection.”
“It really gave me an opportunity to look at how to learn even more deeply how to love him unconditionally,” Smith said. “I got to see how unkind I can be in times that I am not embracing my loved ones’ humanness.”
Smith’s press tour around “Worthy” has been one for the ages. So far the star has revealed that she and Will Smith have been separated since 2016, they have no plans to divorce, that Will Smith referring to her as his “wife” is part of her shock around the Oscars slap and that Chris Rock apologized to her after the incident, just to name a few of the bombs she’s dropped lately.