After revealing last week that she’d been secretly separated from Will Smith for seven years, actor and “Red Table Talk” host Jada Pinkett Smith told Stephen Colbert on Monday that the movie star is “still my man.”
“The Late Show” comedian asked Pinkett Smith if Smith was still her husband or now a former husband. The pair are not legally divorced.
“That’s still my man. That’s still my man,” replied Pinkett Smith.
She later called Smith her “dude” and “right hand” and described the pair as “life partners.”
Pinkett Smith, whose new memoir “Worthy” came out Tuesday, explained why she didn’t share the news of the split sooner.
“Listen, uncoupling consciously is a very difficult thing so in this process of learning how to, you know, I had a lot of things I had to resolve so it wasn’t like a war in public,” she told Colbert. “I didn’t want that for Will and I. And so I really needed time to get myself together.”
The fallout from Smith slapping Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars over a joke about Pinkett Smith’s shaved head (she’s had alopecia for years) actually brought them closer, she added.
Smith invited her to attend the ceremony with him, which certainly wasn’t a given, she said.
“I didn’t go to the Oscars necessarily as Will’s wife but when the event occurred, I knew in that moment that I wasn’t going to leave his side,” she recalled. “And I knew in that moment I didn’t go to that theatre as his wife, but I was leaving as his wife and I was going to stand by his side no matter what. And that’s when I knew, I was like, ‘I love this man.’”
Pinkett Smith said “years and years of stuff” between Smith and Rock “came to a head” at the Academy Awards but said it was “a story for them” that she was “actually not” a part of.
In her memoir, Pinkett Smith revealed Rock asked her out in 2016 amid rumours she’d split from Smith and “profusely apologised” to her after she denied the claims.
Watch the interview here: