Actor Will Smith has been transparent about many aspects of his life in his new memoir, Will, which was released on Tuesday.
In an excerpt from the book according to USA Today, Smith shared that his wife Jada Pinkett Smith’s relationship with the late legendary rapper Tupac Shakur made him feel insecure.
“Though they were never intimate, their love for each other is legendary — they defined ‘ride or die,'” he wrote. “In the beginning of our relationship, my mind was tortured by their connection. He was ‘PAC! and I was me.”
Smith added that the sense of inadequacy he felt was similar to feelings from his youth when his younger brother, Harry, stood up to their abusive father.
He noted that Shakur had a “fearless passion that was intoxicating, a militant morality, and a willingness to fight and die for what he believed was right.”
“Pac was like Harry — he triggered the perception of myself as a coward,” wrote Smith. “I hated that I wasn’t what he was in the world, and I suffered a raging jealousy: I wanted Jada to look at me like that.”
Smith wrote that when he and Jada started dating in 1995, he felt a “twisted kind of victory,” that the actress chose him over Shakur. “If she chose me over Tupac, there was no way I could be a coward,” he wrote.
“I have rarely felt more validated. I was in a room with Tupac on multiple occasions, but I never spoke to him. The way Jada loved ‘Pac rendered me incapable of being friends with him. I was too immature.”
Smith and Jada were married in December 1997 after a brief engagement.
In a 2017 interview with Howard Stern, Jada said that she and Tupac had a “hardcore” fight before he died because she felt he was going in “a destructive direction” in life. She noted that the two of them weren’t speaking at the time of his death.
Jada and Shakur attended The Baltimore School for the Arts as high schoolers. She said that they had a platonic relationship.
In an episode of Red Table Talk, Jada told Robyn Crawford, who was best friends with Whitney Houston, that her book, which the author called, “a love letter to Whitney,” was “healing” for her.
Jada said, “It’s hard to love someone who has had a legacy at the level she has had and then to lose them under tragic circumstances. I have a very similar situation.”
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