On Sunday, March 27, Will Smith is widely expected to become only the fifth black man to win the Best Actor Oscar.
He’ll be following in the footsteps of Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, Jamie Foxx, and Forest Whitaker if he wins for “King Richard,” in which he plays Richard Williams, the ferociously ambitious and eccentric father of tennis champions Serena and Venus Williams. Every other major prize this season has gone to him, including the SAG, BAFTA, and NAACP image awards.
However, the 53-year-old actor’s ‘open’ marriage to Jada Pinkett Smith, his 25-year wife, continues to make headlines.
Last Sunday, when he missed the BAFTAs to stay in Los Angeles for the Critics Choice Awards, host Rebel Wilson quipped that his “best performance in the past year was being OK with all his wife’s boyfriends.”
But as one industry source told The Post: “Look at all the A-list couples on the red carpet — who knows what goes on with them. At least with Jada and Will, there is no pretending.”
“Their love is deeply rooted and it goes to the core and neither one is going anywhere,” said a Smith family source. “But just because that love is present does not mean that every need is necessarily met within the marriage. An outside experience is occasionally desired or, one would say, needed.”
One insider who knows the couple told The Post that it was was too simplistic to say the couple has an open marriage, explaining they had gone through therapy and come out the other side: “It’s not true to say they were never monogamous to begin with — this is the evolution of a marriage.”
“Will pour his heart and soul into ‘King Richard’ – it’s the film that rekindled his love for acting,” an insider claimed. “And it’s just so awful that this success has been eclipsed by sensational headlines.”
Jada’s “entanglement” with R&B artist August Alsina, who had previously alleged that he had an affair with the actress, was revealed to the couple in 2020.
“I fully committed myself to that relationship for years of my life,” Alsina said on “The Breakfast Club” morning show. “I honestly and really, really sincerely adore and have a ton of affection for her.”
Will and Jada admitted it a month later on her Facebook Watch show “Red Table Talk.”
“I’d had enough of you.”
“We called it quits,” Jada admitted. “It was over.”
She went on to say that she was in “a relationship” with Alsina, but that it wasn’t a “transgression” because she and Will were on a break at the time.
Will later told GQ in September 2021 that their relationship had progressed beyond monogamy, and that the two had “given each other trust and freedom” inside their relationship since marriage “can’t be a jail.” “Jada never believed in traditional marriage,” he continued.
“A viewer could have walked away thinking that Jada was the only one engaged in other sexual relationships, when that was not, Smith delicately revealed to me, in fact the situation,” claimed writer Wesley Lowery, who interviewed Will for GQ.
The pair is in a better place now than they were during Jada’s “entanglement,” according to a family source.
“Things have been discussed between the two, and they do care about each other at the end of the day.” There is a solid friendship, a firm foundation, even before the love,” remarked a family source: “They could get a divorce easy, but for what?” What exactly would that show? At the very least, they are truthful to each other, which is something that many married couples are unable to say. People, especially married ones, cheat all day long. Every marriage is unique; you just happen to be familiar with their situation since they are public personalities.”
Will and Jada are “wildly sexual,” according to another person who spoke to The Washington Post.
Representatives for the Smiths declined to comment for this story.
Will and Jada are refusing to allow talk about their “open” marriage detract from the actor’s Oscar hopes, according to a family insider.
“Thank you for all the years of joy you’ve brought us,” E! red carpet host Laverne Cox remarked to the couple at the SAG Awards last month. We’re looking forward to more ‘Red Table Talk’ and ‘entanglements.'”
“No more of those,” Jada remarked many times, forcing a grin from Smith, who stood beside her.
Nonetheless, it’s believed he has a solid shot at winning. “Will has always been respected in Hollywood, people genuinely like him,” a Hollywood insider told The Post. “The Oscars are partially for acting and partially for popularity — that’s his turf.”
Smith has talked about the highs and lows of navigating Hollywood after growing up in an abusive home.
In his 2021 memoir, “Will,” the actor wrote that he forged his movie-star persona to hide “the coward” he felt like as a child, after watching his father, Willard Carroll Smith Sr., abuse his mother, Caroline.
“I was probably nine, and I watched my father beat up my mother,” Smith told the “Today” show in November: “And I was too scared to do anything. And just on my young mind, it became imprinted. It’s like, what kind of kid stands there and lets somebody hit their mother and they don’t do anything, you know? And that became really the core trauma of my childhood that my personality and my persona became to form around, to be the opposite of that, you know? I was never going to be scared again.”
Smith transformed himself into a charming rapper, an action hero, a sitcom star able to make millions laugh, a sex symbol and, with movies like “Six Degrees of Separation” and “King Richard,” a serious actor, too.
He has said that he saw parallels between his father and Richard Williams, who took his girls from the streets of Compton to the grass courts of Wimbledon.
“There was a certain amount of brutality that Richard Williams and my father suffered that created a certain hardness and endurance,” Will told Kotb.
“What was really difficult for me is my father’s my hero,” he added of Smith Sr., who died in 2016. “My father’s the greatest person I’ve ever known, and that dichotomy breaks a young mind, you know? It’s like, how do you love somebody who did that?”
Therapy and self-exploration have helped Will, and Jada — whose share son Jaden, 23, and daughter Willow, 21 — work through past hurts.
The actor revealed in his memoir that, after they temporarily split in 2011, he visited a tantric sex expert and tripped on ayahuasca “14 times” to help heal his broken heart.
They’ve been through therapy, and this is where their relationship has landed,” said the insider. “They love each other very much.”
Still, the family source doesn’t understand why Alsina or anyone else involved with the Smiths would publicly expose what was, apparently, a pretty good set-up.
“Leave it to a youngin’ to open his mouth and blow up the whole situation,” the family source said. “Trust and believe, there are others that can talk — but why mess up a good thing, especially if it is working to your benefit?”