Jada Pinkett Smith Reveals Deeper Chris Rock History Behind Oscar Slap

Jada Pinkett Smith’s upcoming tell-all, Worthy, is sure to be a page-turner. It’s nearly a week before the book even releases and the 52-year-old is already making plenty of headlines. In addition to her latest reveal that she and Will Smith, her husband of over 25 years, have been living separate lives since 2016, Pinkett Smith has finally opened up about the infamous 2022 Oscars slap.

Like many of us watching from home, Pinkett Smith initially believed the moment to be scripted. Of course, it quickly became apparent that was definitely not the case.

“I thought, ‘This is a skit,'” she told People in a new interview published on Wednesday. “I was like, ‘There’s no way that Will hit him. It wasn’t until Will started to walk back to his chair that I even realized it wasn’t a skit.” 

When the pair were finally alone, Pinkett Smith remembers the first thing she said to her then-estranged husband was: “Are you okay?”

However, the tension between Rock and Pinkett Smith started years earlier in 2016, during the #OscarsSoWhite movement. Whereas the comedian had been tapped to host that year, Pinkett Smith had been in vocal support of a boycott of the ceremony after Smith was snubbed for his performance in the 2015 biographical sports drama Concussion. Likewise, no actors of color had been recognized by the Academy in the nominations that year. 

Rock admitted in his Netflix comedy special that came out earlier this year that Pinkett Smith had pressured him to quit the hosting gig out of solidarity, and he went on to make jokes about her in his monologue. In a separate interview, she says she was “not really recognizing the level of pressure [Chris] might’ve been under.”

“Chris came down to the end of the stage and tried to apologize to me,” Pinkett Smith recalled of the 2022 Oscars, post-slap. “He said, ‘I didn’t mean you any harm.’ I said, ‘I can’t talk about this now, Chris. This is some old shit.’ I thought this was [about] the Oscar 2016.”

“I mean, that’s what comedians do,” she continued. “I would just have to say that I am not really here to make any judgment on how people decide to express themselves and express their art. I’ll say that several times I’ve had my feelings hurt, for sure. I’ve had my feelings hurt a lot by Chris. But at the end of the day, too, being in the spotlight, it comes with the territory.”

However, to add some more nuance to her relationship with Rock, Pinkett Smith also revealed that their 58-year-old once asked her out on a date. However, it’s unclear exactly when the proposal occurred, and whether it was before or after the 2016 Oscars, which was the same year the couple would quietly call it quits.

“I think every summer all the reports would come out that me and Will were getting a divorce, she explained. “And this particular summer, Chris, he thought that we were getting a divorce. So he called me and basically he was like, ‘I’d love to take you out.’ And I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ He was like, ‘Well, aren’t you and Will getting a divorce?’ I was like, ‘No. Chris, those are just rumors.’ He was appalled. And he profusely apologized and that was that.”

We can probably expect even more juicy revelations like these when Worthy hits shelves on Oct. 17.