The late rapper went to school with Jada.
Will Smith isn't afraid to get candid about his marriage and his struggles with wife Jada Pinkett Smith. During a new interview with The Breakfast Club, host Charlemagne tha God asked Will if he was ever jealous of the relationship between his wife of 22 years and her childhood friend, the late rapper Tupac Shakur.
"Oh, f**k yeah. Oh, my God, dude," the Aladdin star admitted. "That was in the early days. That was a big regret for me too, because I could never open up to interact with Pac, you know. Because we had a little bit of a thing."
He went on to explain the nature of the relationship between Jada and Tupac, adding, "They grew up together and they loved each other but they never had a sexual relationship, but they had come into that age where now that was a possibility and Jada was with me. Pac had a little thing on that."
The 51-year-old actor also noted that his wife "loved" Tupac, saying, "He was the image of perfection, but she was with the Fresh Prince. We were in the room together a couple times. I couldn't speak to him and he wasn't going to speak to me if I wasn't going to speak to him."
Will also said that Jada, 48, encouraged him to befriend the rapper.
"She was like, 'I'm telling you, you all are so similar. You would love him,'" he said of the artist, who died in 1996. "That was a huge regret of mine. I couldn't handle it. I was the soft rapper from Philly and he was Pac."
Jada previously revealed that when she first met Tupac, she was a drug dealer, and that she regrets not helping the late rapper get out of that lifestyle before it was too late. In September 1996, Tupac was shot to death in Las Vegas, Nevada.
In the radio interview, Will also opened up about how the couple struggles between their image and reality.
"Me and Jada talk about that a lot even in the idea of our marriage and how people want us to be married versus how we're really married," he said. "It's a really different thing and it's so hard to let go of the characters and what people want to see."
Will added that as a couple they've been "wildly tested."
"We've tested each other. We've tested our commitment to the partnership. We've tested our commitment to the family," he said. "There's a certain amount of battery you have to subject each other to in order to know that you're really down."
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