Will Smith and wife Jada Pinkett looked closer than ever as they enjoyed a rare date night in LA on Thursday – marking their first joint sighting since May.
The Oscar winner, 56, and the Scream 2 star, 52, wrapped their arms around each other at a restaurant – 13 months after revealing they had decided to secretly separate back in 2016.
Jada looked casually cool in a gold jacket and jeans as she chatted with her husband, who wore a grey jacket, white tee and slacks.
The pair were seen enthusiastically greeting life coach and former monk Jay Shetty, 37, at dinner.
The status of Will and Jada’s marriage is complex. The last time they were pictured publicly together was at the May premiere of Will’s movie Bad Boys: Ride Or Die.
The I Am Legend star was joined by the actress — whom he called his ride or die — at the TCL Chinese Theatre.
It was a full on family affair, as the pair were also accompanied by their kids Willow, 24, and Jaden, 26, and Will’s oldest son Trey, 31, from his first marriage to Sheree Zampino, 56.
His mother-in-law Adrienne Banfield-Norris, 70, also showed her support and was seen posing for pictures with the family on the red carpet.
While appearing on the Today Show in October 2023, Pinkett Smith told Hoda Kotb that they made the decision to separate seven years earlier, after feeling ‘exhausted with trying’ to work on their marriage.
‘I think we were both still stuck in our fantasy of what we thought the other person should be,’ she explained of what caused them to drift apart.
In Pinkett Smith’s book, Worthy, she describes the separation as a ‘divorce,’ but clarified they never filed any paperwork.
‘It was not a divorce on paper. But it was a divorce,’ Pinkett Smith said.
In the interview, the mother-of-two – who admitted in 2020 that she’d had an affair with singer August Alsina – said she considered a legal divorce but could never go through with it, candidly revealing that she made a ‘promise’ to her husband that she would never give him a ‘reason’ to get divorced.
She noted that no permanent decisions have been made about the future of her marriage, explaining that she and Will are ‘still figuring it out’.
‘We’ve been doing some really heavy-duty work together,’ she said. ‘We just got deep love for each other and we are going to figure out what that looks like.’
Jada’s marriage to Will came under blistering public scrutiny in 2020, when she interviewed him on her chat show Red Table Talk about an ‘entanglement’ she had four years earlier with Alsina, who is 21 years her junior.
The relationship gained even more notoriety in 2022 when Will slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars for making a bald joke about Jada that visibly offended her.
While speaking to Daily Mail’s YOU Magazine, Pinkett Smith said ‘many positive things came after’ Smith slapped Rock.
‘After all those years trying to figure out if I would leave Will’s side, it took that slap for me to see I will never leave him. Who knows where our relationship would be if that hadn’t happened?’
