The actress also revealed the first thing she said to Smith when they were alone after the moment he hit Chris Rock on stage at the 2022 Academy Awards.
The moment Will Smith shocked the world by slapping Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars ceremony initially came off as “a skit” to Jada Pinkett Smith.
In a interview published Wednesday amid her bombshell revelation that she separated from Smith in 2016 — six years before the 94th Academy Awards — the Set It Off actress has given an official reaction to the controversial incident for the first time.
“I thought, ‘This is a skit,’” she told PEOPLE in an interview tied to her new memoir, Worthy, roughly 18 months after Smith approached Rock during the live telecast and hit him in the face after he made a joke about Pinkett Smith’s shaved head, the result of her alopecia. “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.”
Pinkett Smith also recalled the first words she said to Smith when they were alone afterwards that night: She said she asked him, “Are you okay?”
She continued, “I’m going to be by his side, but also allow him to have to figure this out for himself.”
Amid fallout from the slap, Smith was permitted to keep his Best Actor statuette, which he won later that night for his performance in King Richard, though he was banned from attending Academy-related events for 10 years.
He eventually addressed the incident in a video later that year as well as in a November 2022 interview with Trevor Noah on The Daily Show, while Pinkett Smith called for Smith and Rock to “reconcile” on an episode of her Red Table Talk show.
“That was a horrific night, as you can imagine,” Smith told Noah. “There are many nuances and complexities to it. But, at the end of the day, I lost it, and I guess what I would say, you just never know what somebody’s going through, you know?”
He continued, “I was going through something that night. Not that that justifies my behavior at all. You’re asking, what did I learn? It’s that we’ve just gotta be nice to each other, man. It’s hard. I guess the thing that was most painful for me is, I took my hard and made it hard for other people. I understood the idea of when they say hurt people hurt people.”
Pinkett Smith’s remarks follow a major development in the timeline of her relationship with Smith, whom she married in 1997. The Matrix and Girls Trip star revealed to Today that the couple, who share two children, Jaden and Willow, separated in 2016 and have lived separate lives for nearly seven years.
“Why it fractured? That’s a lot of things, and I think by the time we got to 2016, we were just exhausted with trying,” Pinkett Smith told Hoda Kotb during the conversation. “I think we were both stuck in our fantasy of what we thought the other person should be.”
Representatives for Will Smith did not immediately respond to EW’s request for comment.