The second season of Jada Pinkett Smith’s “Red Table Talk” premiered Monday, Oct. 22 and among the most stunning revelations is just how soon Will Smith started dating the actress after divorcing Sheree Zampino.
The couple, who have been married for over 20 years, sat down with their daughter Willow Smith and Pinkett Smith’s mother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris and revealed Smith had wanted to meet Pinkett Smith during the first season of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” when she was on “A Different World” in the mid-1990s. He was set to get introduced to Pinkett Smith but then he met Zampino, whom he wound up marrying and having a son with.
But Smith, whose wife made it clear the pair never had an affair, always knew there was an “energy” between them. After he and Pinkett Smith chatted one night during a get away with pals Duane Martin and Tisha Campbell-Martin, something changed.
“That next night, me and Sheree went to dinner … and it was one of the most bizarre emotions I ever had after we had that talk,” he explains at the 5:50 mark. “I had to get up from dinner when I had a realization that I wasn’t with the person I was supposed to be with… I was sitting in a stall and I was crying and laughing uncontrollably, and I knew [Pinkett Smith] was the woman I was supposed to be with, but I was never getting divorced… I went back out, sat down with Sheree and started going back on with my life.”
But while he wasn’t ever willing to divorce Zampino, she was and filed to end their three-year marriage on Valentine’s Day. By 1995, the marriage was officially done. The same day he finally signed the documents was the day he called his now-wife and started dating her.
“I remember I was like, ‘I’m gonna sign the divorce papers.’ … I literally walked right out from there, I called Jada,” Smith says around the 8 minute mark. “I said ‘Hey Jada, what’s up? It’s Will.’ She said ‘Hey, how you doing?’ I said, ‘Good, are you seeing anybody?’ She said, ‘Uh, no,’ and I said ‘Cool, you’re seeing me now.’”
“And my dumb ass was like, ‘Okay,'” Pinkett Smith recalled.
The actress, who had moved home to Baltimore where she bought a farm, flew back to Los Angeles and never spent a single night on the farm.
Fans took to Twitter to share their reactions to how the pair started their relationship.
“Will called up Jada and said ‘You dating me now.’ Big Energy Smith Ctfu ..and right there Ch. 1 of their forever began.”
“This is how Will Smith bagged Jada 😭😂❤️ I love them.”
“Will & Jada’s story about how they met and how they started dating….wow. Just wow.”
https://www.facebook.com/redtabletalk/videos/2174148442809253/
