Jada Pinkett Smith confessed that she “really didn’t want to get married” to Will Smith.
In fact, the “Matrix” actress — now on the roasting spit of Smith’s
infamous Oscars smack-down of Chris Rock and the Academy’s decision Friday
to ban him from the ceremony for 10 years — admitted to “crying down the freaking aisle” before tying the knot with the “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” star on New Year’s Eve in 1997.
“I was under so much pressure, you know, being a young actress, being young, and I was just, like, pregnant and I just didn’t know what to do,” declared Pinkett Smith, 50, in a freshly exhumed snippet from her “Red Table Talk” Facebook series.
“I never wanted to be married.”
In the clip from 2018 — which has resurfaced amid renewed controversy around her louche “
entanglement” with R&B singer August Alsina, 29 —
Pinkett Smith candidly recalls her mother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris, also known as “Gammy,” 68, forcing her and Smith to wed after she became pregnant with their first son together, Jaden, now 23.
“I really didn’t wanna get married,” Pinkett Smith restated while seated around the circular table with her mom, as well as Smith, 53, and their daughter Willow, 21.
“We only got married because Gammy was crying,” a chuckling Smith informed Willow.
“It was almost as if Gammy was like, ‘You have to get married, so let’s talk about the wedding,’” said Pinkett Smith, prompting
Banfield-Norris to confess, “I remember feeling very strongly and wanting you guys to be married.”
The “Girls Trip” star’s mother was just 18 when she became pregnant with Pinkett Smith, and briefly married her father, Robsol Pinkett Jr.
“I do remember [wanting you and Will to get married] but I don’t remember your rejection of the idea of marriage,” Banfield-Norris added. “I remember the rejection of the idea of a wedding but not of a marriage.”
Pinkett Smith then recalled being browbeaten into Big Day submission.
“And now Gammy done gone to Will, crying about ‘I don’t want a wedding,’ and now I’m being forced to have a wedding,” she said. “I just wanted it to be the two of us on a mountain because I was like: ‘This is serious business.’”
