It’s busy work keeping up with the Smiths. Hollywood supercouple Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith have spent several years showering the public with candid insights into their relationship. There were reports of an “open” marriage. Jada’s “entanglement” with country singer August Alsina. Details of Will and Jada’s sex life. Now, her recent claim that the pair have been secretly separated for seven years – but are working on reconciliation. To say they’ve laid their cards on the table is an understatement: they’ve put down an entire deck each, enough for a whole canasta game of tabloid gossip.
Inevitably, this penchant for oversharing has sometimes proved too much for people. It starts to take on the feeling of a years-long publicity tour, where the only thing they’re promoting is their own eccentric relationship. Many of us claim to have heard quite enough from Mr and Mrs Smith; some truths are best left unaired, they say. But between Jada’s new memoir Worthy, her frank podcast Red Table Talk, and now the suggestion that the duo may soon be writing a book together, it doesn’t sound like they’re shutting up any time soon. This is nothing to be irked by, however. The fact is, the Will and Jada Honesty Roadshow is a radical – and refreshing – departure from celebrity norms.
Celebs these days – especially those few with the supernova fame of Will Smith – are all too often muzzled by PRs, their every interview, tweet, or offhand utterance policed by a crack squad of image micromanagers. In Hollywood, every star is a brand, every brand an asset that needs safeguarding. Perhaps still dizzy from the infamous Academy Awards slap of March 2022, Will and Jada have thrown the A-listers’ handbook out the window. The effect may be grating, but it’s also humanising.
On the surface, there’s little about the Smiths’ lives that falls even remotely within the boundaries of “relatability”. Theirs is a relationship that is – unavoidably – contaminated by their rapacious celebrity. Like Charles and Diana, there are three people in this marriage: Will, Jada, and the media’s unblinking eye. (Or four, perhaps, if we were to include Alsina.) But the fact is that the sheer complicated messiness of it does touch on something universal. Other people’s relationships are fundamentally unknowable and unique. Perhaps what’s most disarming about Will and Jada’s never-ending life updates is the realisation that we, as outsiders, have no idea what really goes on in these people’s lives, other than what they choose to reveal to us. By extension, we never really know what’s going on in most anybody’s lives, in the scheme of things. The Smiths are a living, breathing, slapping reminder that people, and relationships, are deeper and knottier than they appear.
Most famous people are dysfunctional in some way or another, of course. (How could the glory and alienation of stardom not take some kind of psychic toll?) The majority are just more adept at hiding it. Smith’s Oscars slap brought his personal issues lurching into plain sight, and his relationship with Jada was an inextricable part of that. It overshadowed his Best Actor win, and will in all likelihood overshadow his entire career. But that’s not to say that he is broken by it. On Tuesday, after days of furore over Jada’s latest revelations about his marriage, Smith shared a video on Instagram pretending to launch into an “Official Statement” – only to troll followers by sneezing, sending the camera whizzing away. More sincerely, the I Am Legend star suggested to The New York Times that he had been “woken up” by Jada’s memoir Worthy and realised she is more “resilient, clever and compassionate than he’d understood”.
“When you’ve been with someone for more than half of your life, a sort of emotional blindness sets in, and you can all too easily lose your sensitivity to their hidden nuances and subtle beauties,” he said. Maybe this, too, is an overshare. But stand it next to the usual celebrity platitudes, and I say let them keep talking.
