Jada Pinkett Smith Says Chris Rock Asked Her Out amid Rumors She and Will Were Getting A Divorce
The actress, whose book Worthy is out Oct. 17, tells PEOPLE in a candid new interview that “no, I haven’t talked to Chris” since the March 27, 2022, when her husband Will Smith struck him onstage at the Oscars after taking issue with a joke made about Jada.
“[Do I have] any desire to talk to Chris? Here’s my desire: I just hope that all the misunderstanding around this can be cleared up and that there can be peace,” she adds.
“I probably should have called him and gone, ‘Hey, are you okay? And just know that although I’m speaking out about the Oscars, I do wish you the best and I just want you to know that,’ me taking the time to have called him and said that, just to touch base. But his feelings might’ve been hurt,” she says.
But, Jada adds, “All we can ever do is just look at our part and see where could I have done something that would’ve seemed as if… Whatever misunderstanding might’ve been created, what could I have done to avoid that misunderstanding? The one thing that I think about is that call.”
Jada says Chris, 58, called her afterward in 2016 and she thought they’d moved on.
“He apologized and I apologized to him as well,” she says. “So I actually thought that we were good, that the hatchet was buried between us. And we hadn’t talked since then, until 2022 came.”
Directly after the slap, Jada says Chris came downstage to speak to her during a pause in the live broadcast, where he was presenting an award.
“Chris came down to the end of the stage and tried to apologize to me. He said, ‘I didn’t mean you any harm.’ I said, ‘I can’t talk about this now, Chris. This is some old s—.’ I thought this was [about] the Oscar 2016 and … their stuff that they had before I even came into the picture in the late ‘80s. I’ve got to leave that to Will and Chris to talk about, but they got their stuff for sure.”
Was Jada, who lives with alopecia, offended by the joke at the center of the Oscars incident, Chris making a punchline about her shaved head?
“I mean, that’s what comedians do,” says Jada. “I would just have to say that I am not really here to make any judgment on how people decide to express themselves and express their art. I’ll say that several times I’ve had my feelings hurt, for sure. I’ve had my feelings hurt a lot by Chris. But at the end of the day, too, being in the spotlight, it comes with the territory.”
Jada also reveals in her book that Chris once asked her out on a date.
She said: “I think every summer all the reports would come out that me and Will were getting a divorce. And this particular summer, Chris, he thought that we were getting a divorce. So he called me and basically he was like, ‘I’d love to take you out.’ And I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ He was like, ‘Well, aren’t you and Will getting a divorce?’ I was like, ‘No. Chris, those are just rumors.’ He was appalled. And he profusely apologized and that was that.”
