Jada Pinkett Smith Thought the Oscars Slap Was About An Old Beef

Jada Pinkett Smith and Chris Rock have definitely seen better days, because after the much-publicized 2022 Oscars slap, things have been pretty much mute between them.

While she hopes everyone can move on and find “peace” after the noteworthy incident, she does believe that the slap wasn’t entirely because of the joke since there had been some tensions in the past.

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This Oct. 17, Jada’s new memoir “Worthy” will be out. And if we know Jada at all, we know that she will not bite back from spilling the itty-bitty details about everything. The more juicier a story is, the more likely she’ll dive in deep.

In the exclusive interview with PEOPLE, published on October 11, the “Gotham City” actress said she hasn’t gotten a chance to talk to Chris since her husband Will hit him out of anger for a joke he made.

“[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 said.

“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 52-year-old revealed.

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And what did happen at the 2016 Oscars? It happens that Will was overlooked for his “Concussion” performance and the acting nominations recognized no actor of color that year, leading Jada to head the movement #OscarsSoWhite movement, and calling for a boycott of the award show.

Chris, who was hosting that year, made jokes about Jada in his monologue. Later on, Chris would claim in his Netflix comedy special that Jada told him he should quit the hosting gig out of solidarity.

As to this, Jada revealed she might not have been all that in the right to do that, adding that she didn’t take into account “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. But his feelings might’ve been hurt,” she said.

Jada Pinkett Smith – Says She Would Have Loved To Have Done Something To Prevent The Misunderstanding

Speaking about moving on from the situation, Jada added, “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.”

She then shared that Chris, 58, called her afterward in 2016, and she thought they had moved on. “He apologized and I apologized to him as well,” she recalled. “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 recalled Chris approaching her to apologize.

“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.”

When asked whether she was bothered about the bald joke due to living with alopecia, she 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.”

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