Consider us officially enlightened 🙌 Jada Pinkett Smith stopped by On Air With Ryan Seacrest on Wednesday, January 23, and talked candidly with Ryan Seacrest about her transparent Facebook show Red Table Talk, being married to Will Smith and the forthcoming Sundance Film Festival.
Jada’s web series Red Table Talk features herself, her mother Adrienne Banfield-Norris and daughter Willow Smith and offers a forum where the perspectives of three different generations on a wide variety of topics are shared.
“I had three experiences with three woman at very crucial moments in my life that were courageous enough to be completely transparent with me and it really prevented me from doing some really stupid stuff and I thought to myself ‘Woman need to talk more like this together’ because I feel like it could prevent just a lot of pitfalls,” Jada shared of the creation of the show. “After those three experiences, I just realized I just want to have more candid, more transparent conversations.”
So far, Jada, her mother and daughter have covered a wide range of topics and personal revelations on the show, including when 18-year-old Willow opened up about a painful secret she hid from her family for years.
“I would probably say the show about loss [was the hardest to film] because I actually, just moments before shooting the show, had lost a very close friend of mine,” Jada shared. “I got a phone call and then I got to learn some things about Willow in that particular episode and I really learned a lot and there were a lot of things I had to in the moment kind of handle,” she added. “[Willow’s] self-harm situation and me in a moment having to catch myself and go 'This is not about you, this is not about what you should have done,' this is really about you listening to your daughter. … We can’t be there for every dark space … and I had real understanding about that because there were a lot of darks moments in my own life I kept away from my mother because I didn’t want to burden her.”
Jada added that despite sometimes being difficult, there aren’t any topics that are off limits necessarily.
“I think there’s a certain freedom of having a certain amount of transparency because people think these things of you and now you can just put it on the table, [like,] 'This is who I am,'” Jada continued. “… It is a liberating feeling that I think even my kids were ready for and … even though we share a lot on the show, we are still pretty private, because these are situations [we’ve already gone through] … the things that we are going through now, we are maybe not ready to talk about [yet].”
Something Jada is able to talk about is the journey she’s gone through with husband Will Smith, whom she now only refers to as her life partner.
“I just felt like husband and wife had a lot of limitations to it and I just realized with the death of my father … it was very difficult for me to connect to him because of this title ‘dad,’” Jada explained. “… I did a lot of rejecting of him … because I felt like he had failed me as a father because that’s the only way I could identify him … and I felt like part of my journey with Will not being able to really embrace him as a human being and really embrace his traumas and his problems and only being able to see him as a husband had a limitation on our connection and my willingness of how I was connecting to him and I just decided I wanted to drop all that … For me, I had to drop that title because I had to expand, and let me tell you, it has been so beautiful.”
Watch back their full interview in the video above to hear more, including Jada’s forthcoming excitement for the Sundance Film Festival and the empowering project she’s involved in.