She’s been picked apart by gossip columnists, stereotyped and had her alopecia become part of a global scandal. But now, as her new series hits our screens, the star is being zen about it all …
Jada Pinkett Smith plays many roles in a day. She’s an actor, a mum, a wife. Once the frontwoman of a metal band called Wicked Wisdom, she is also a soon-to-be memoirist – as well as, to some, an almost pathological over-sharer on Red Table Talk, the Facebook Watch chatshow she co-hosts with her daughter Willow and her mother Adrienne “Gammy” Banfield-Norris.
But Pinkett Smith isn’t entirely comfortable with the reputation she has acquired: a honey-voiced, wise woman who never seems ruffled or fazed – a “level five auntie” as someone on social media put it. “Well, it’s interesting,” she says, speaking from her Los Angeles office. “I don’t really look at it that way. But I do think that, as we get older, that’s how it should be.” She laughs and soon I’m on the receiving end of one of her classic soothing declarations. It feels like a cross between a sermon and a guided meditation.
