The actor reveals the breaking point in his marriage to Jada.
Will Smith is continuing to open up about his marriage to Jada Pinkett Smith. The 53-year-old actor is featured in a new cover story for GQ, and discusses the revelations in his upcoming memoir, Will.
GQ interviewer, Wesley Lowery, read an advanced copy of the book, and notes that Will does not go into much detail about his marriage to Jada. The Hitch star says that a lot of details regarding their relationship have already been made public, including Jada's "entanglement" with singer August Alsina, which she opened up about on her Facebook Watch show, Red Table Talk, in July 2020.
“Jada never believed in conventional marriage.… Jada had family members that had an unconventional relationship," Will says of his wife of 23 years. "So she grew up in a way that was very different than how I grew up. There were significant endless discussions about, what is relational perfection? What is the perfect way to interact as a couple? And for the large part of our relationship, monogamy was what we chose, not thinking of monogamy as the only relational perfection.”
The father of three adds that he and Jada decided to go public with their response to Alsina's comments about his romance with Jada in order to protect themselves.
“The pursuit of truth is the only way to be happy in this lifetime,” he shares. “And we sort of came to the agreement that authenticity was the release from the shackles of fame and public scrutiny.”
Will adds that despite the memes that popped up of him looking upset afterward Jada's RTT episode, there was another reason behind his expression.
“It was midnight and we were going on vacation the next day,” he says, sharing that the details of the RTT discussion were years old. “It was like, no, no, no, guys, I’m not sad. I’m f**king exhausted.”
Lowery also notes in his GQ story that Will "delicately explained" to him that Jada was not "the only one engaging in other sexual relationships" outside of their marriage.
“We have given each other trust and freedom, with the belief that everybody has to find their own way," Will says of his and Jada's arrangement. "And marriage for us can’t be a prison. And I don’t suggest our road for anybody. I don’t suggest this road for anybody. But the experiences that the freedoms that we’ve given one another and the unconditional support, to me, is the highest definition of love.”
Will also touches on his fantasies involving other celebrity women, and candidly discusses working with intimacy coach Michaela Boehm, sharing that his greatest desire in the world was to have a harem of girlfriends.
Will admitted to Boehm that dancer Misty Copeland and actress Halle Berry were high on his fantasy list, and even had her work on the list with him and had planned to contact the women.
“I don’t know where I saw it or some s**t as a teenager, but the idea of traveling with 20 women that I loved and took care of and all of that, it seemed like a really great idea,” Will shares with GQ. “And then, after we played it out a little bit, I was like, ‘That would be horrific. That would be horrific.’ I was like, ‘Can you imagine how miserable?’"
The two-time Oscar nominee says that the intimacy coach was "cleaning out my mind, letting it know it was OK to be me and be who I was."
Though Will and Jada are in a much better place now, he opens up in his book about some of the toughest moments in their marriage. The actor writes that they reached a breaking point in 2011 on Jada's 40th birthday. He says he'd spent three years planning a private dinner for family and friends in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and did a screening of a documentary he'd commissioned that chronicled Jada's life and traced her family's lineage all the way back to slavery. When the couple returned to their hotel that evening, Jada was silent before Will recalls her saying, “That was the most disgusting display of ego I have ever seen in my life."
The exchange sparked a fight so explosive that their daughter, Willow, begged them to stop as she cried with her hands over her ears.
“Our marriage wasn’t working,” Will shares in his book. “We could no longer pretend. We were both miserable and clearly something had to change.”
The actor's memoir, Will, is to be released on Nov. 9.
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