In a new interview with Rolling Out, Jada Pinkett Smith called 2Pac her "soulmate" even though they were never more than friends.
When asked if there was such a thing as a "soulmate friendship," Pinkett Smith said "absolutely" and said that the "romanticized idea" of a soulmate isn't the only way such a connection can form. "If there is such a thing as past lives, I definitely think that Pac and I have traveled a few together," she said of her close friend. Asked if she had any "regrets" about not taking their connection beyond a friendship, she replied, "It just wasn't possible, there was no chemistry between us."
She added that she speaks about her connection with Pac in her new memoir Worthy, but added that there was a "friendship-love chemistry" between them. Ultimately, she believed a potential future between them "wasn't the purpose" of their relationship. "It was like God made us that way," she said." It was like, look, I'm going to put y'all together, right? Y'all are going to be a dynamic duo. But I'm going to tell you right now, I'm going to make it so y'all are not going to be able to get together 'cause that just wasn't the purpose."
Additionally, in a preview of an interview on All the Smoke, she said that Pac proposed to her while he was in jail. "I talk about this in the book, when I go to see him in Rikers," she said. "When I had to talk about it, speak my words for the Audible version of the book, that was probably one of the more painful parts. Seeing him there, the condition he was in, and having to leave him there. He was in bad shape."
She continued, "So when he asked me to get married, he was at Rikers. And I knew at that time that A. He needed someone to do time with him, which I was going to do anyway. You ain't have to marry me to do time. ... And then, he needed a rock. Because of friendship, because of everything we had been through together. He just wanted to feel that solidified foundation. Because I promise you, he woulda married me and divorced me as soon as his ass left jail."
She attributed his proposal to the "mind state" he was in at the time, adding that he wrote her a "long letter." Pinkett Smith said that she believed he wanted to "tether [himself]" to "keep [him] on a trajectory."
Pinkett Smith has long been open about her love for Pac, whom she met while attending the Baltimore City School for the Arts. She dated Will Smith after meeting him on the set of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and they later married in December 1997, just over three months after Pac was fatally shot in Las Vegas. Just last month, she shared a cute video of her and Pac lip-syncing to Smith's "Parents Just Don't Understand." She has described her relationship with Pac as "like a brother" in the past and in 2019 she said, "There's not a day that goes by that I don't think about Pac."
Since she often talks about her close connection with Pac, there's long been commentary about how it must make her husband Will Smith feel. Last year, Chris Rock's brother Tony Rock suggested that he thinks Smith's infamous slap at the 94th Annual Academy Awards was actually about "him being slapped on other levels," not the alopecia joke.
"He said it himself, he always hated the ‘soft moniker.’ He’s soft, Jada won’t let 2Pac die, it’s always something about 2Pac and his daughter [Willow Smith] brought up 2Pac," he said on Top Billin' with Bill Bellamy. "And I’m not bringing up family stuff that people don’t know… this is stuff that everybody knows. ... [Jada] commonly talks about Tupac, her relationship with 2Pac. As a married man to this woman, you’re like, ‘Damn is what I’m doing not enough?'"
In 2021, Outlawz rapper Napoleon said there was an apparent love triangle and Pac was told not to beat up Smith when she first started dating him. "He was very upset. Pac came in the room and was like, ‘Jada, she gonna contact me and tell me don’t do nothing to Will Smith,’" he revealed. "So Pac was upset and said, ‘I don’t know why she think I would have tried to make some problems with Will Smith.’ I guess it kind of hurt him. He had a lot of love for Jada Pinkett, a lot of respect for her.”
Will Smith even admitted he was "jealous" of their friendship in a Breakfast Club interview in 2020. "Oh, fuck yeah," he replied when asked if he was ever "jealous" of the "love" Jada had for Pac. "Oh my God, that dude. And you know that was in the early days, too. That was a big regret for me because I could never open up to interact with Pac." He added that they had "a little bit of a thing because they grew up together and they loved each other but they never had a sexual relationship."
Earlier this month, Jada Pinkett Smith revealed Pac that she and her husband made the decision to separate back in 2016, but they aren't thinking about divorce. “Why it fractured, that’s a lot of things,” Jada said. “I think by the time we got to 2016 we were just exhausted with trying. I think we were both kind of still stuck in our fantasy of what we thought the other person should be.”
