Jada Pinkett Smith recently revealed that Chris Rock made a surprising advance by asking her out on a date amid swirling divorce rumors involving her husband, Will Smith.
The 52-year-old actress has been making headlines with revelations from her promotional tour for her upcoming memoir, “Worthy.”
In one of her interviews with People magazine, she disclosed that she and Will have actually been living separately for the past seven years.
During this tumultuous time, Chris Rock took the opportunity to reach out to Jada, expressing his romantic interest one summer.
‘I think every summer all the reports would come out that me and Will were getting a divorce,’ Jada began. ‘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,”‘ she recalled. ‘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.’
DailyMail has reached out to Chris’ reps for comment.
Jada also shared that she hasn’t spoken with Chris since the infamous Oscars slap, when Will slapped Chris after the comedian made a joke about Jada’s bald head.
‘[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 told the publication.
‘I talk about this in the book, I think that there might be some misunderstanding between Chris and I as far as the 2016 Oscars. I think that he might’ve taken offense, which I meant no harm in offending. That wasn’t my intention. But I do think that there’s a big misunderstanding there.’
The 2016 drama began when Will didn’t receive an Oscar nomination for his role in Concussion. This exclusion coincided with a year where no actors of color were nominated in any acting categories, prompting the emergence of the #OscarsSoWhite movement.
In response, some artists boycotted the awards show in protest, including Jada, who even called for Chris to step down as the host of that year’s ceremony.
However, Chris didn’t back out and instead made a joke about Jada during the Oscars ceremony, saying, ‘Jada boycotting the Oscars is like me boycotting Rihanna’s panties – I wasn’t invited.’
Looking back, Jada said she said she was ‘not really recognizing the level of pressure [Chris] might’ve been under’ at the time.
‘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,’ she old People. ‘But his feelings might’ve been hurt.’
She said the pair apologized to each other shortly after the 2016 incident, but they hadn’t spoken until the 2022 Oscars fiasco, where Chris tried to apologize again, this time for the bald joke, per Jada.
‘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—.”‘
As for her reaction to the joke, Jada said, ‘I mean, that’s what comedians do.’
‘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.’
