Actor Will Smith is promoting the release of his pending memoir, Will, which goes on sale next week, and the actor opened up about the book — and his life — in a new interview with Oprah Winfrey.
The engaging interview, The Oprah Conversation, was released on Friday on Apple TV+.
In the teaser trailer, Smith speaks to his romantic relationships, saying, “I’ve carried, most of my life, the sense of failing every woman I interact with. I haven’t talked about that publicly.”
In a September interview with GQ, Smith said, of his book, that he wanted to show people who he really is. He claimed he “just really wanted to totally destroy the clinging to ‘Will Smith,’ trying to separate the image of Will Smith from who I actually am.”
Smith’s book was co-authored by Mark Manson, who wrote the 2016 bestseller, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k.
In Will, he details his early life, including witnessing his father abuse his mother. He also talks about his relationships with women, including former bride Sheree Zampino and his wife of 23 years, actress Jada Pinkett Smith.
Of Pinkett Smith, he recently told GQ, “The pursuit of truth is the only way to be happy in this lifetime. And we sort of came to the agreement that authenticity was the release from the shackles of fame and public scrutiny.”
In Smith’s new interview with Winfrey, Smith says of Pinkett Smith, “Love being the most fearful place you’ll ever try and step into. Real love. That unconditional love … to be able to open a broken heart again.”
In an excerpt of Will in People Magazine, Smith said he “fell in love” with his co-star, actress Stockard Channing, from his debut film, Six Degrees of Separation.
He claims he developed feelings for Channing while practicing method acting, an experience he says turned him off that type of acting. He adds that shooting the film and method acting put a strain on his young marriage.
“Sheree and I were in the first few months of our marriage with a brand-new baby and for Sheree, I can imagine that this experience was unsettling to say the least,” Smith writes in Will. “She’d married a guy named Will Smith and now she was living with a guy named Paul Poitier,” his character’s name in the movie. “And to make matters worse, during shooting I fell in love with Stockard Channing.”
Last year, Zampino appeared on Pinkett Smith’s show, Red Table Talk, where the two women cooked for the holidays together. In the episode, Zampino says, “We are what you call a blended family.”
In addition to releasing his highly-anticipated memoir, Smith is set to star as Richard Williams in the biopic about the father of tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams. The film, King Richard, is again earning Smith Oscar buzz. If nominated, he would be the second Black man nominated for acting and producing a film, according to Variety.
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