'Exhausted with trying.' Jada Pinkett Smith says she and Will Smith have lived separately since 2016.

Jada Pinkett Smith's memoir has revealed she and Will Smith have been living separate lives since 2016.

In her new book, Worthy, Pinkett Smith discusses the state of their high-profile marriage, which has been the subject of rumours for years. In it, she says they are not divorced but are no longer romantically together and live separately.

In an interview with Hoda Kotb on The Today Show, she also stated they had no plans to legally split.

"I made a promise that there will never be a reason for us to get a divorce," she said. "We will work through whatever. And I just haven't been able to break that promise."

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Even so, she told Kotb that she and Smith have lived separately for several years — long before Smith was banned from the Oscars for slapping Chris Rock over a joke about her alopecia.

She said there were "a lot of things" that led to the breakdown of their relationship, stating that by 2016 they were both "exhausted with trying".

"I think we were both just kind of stuck in our fantasy of what we thought the other person should be," she said. 

Pinkett Smith and Smith have been married since 1997 and share two children, 25-year-old Jaden and 22-year-old Willow. Smith also has a son, 30-year-old Trey, from his previous marriage. Despite her revelations, the pair still regularly present a united front at events and on red carpets.

Jade Pinkett Smith and Will Smith at the 2022 Oscars. Image: Getty.

Asked why neither of them shared this news earlier — especially when they opened up about Pinkett Smith's 'entanglement' with August Alsina on a 2020 episode of her series Red Table Talk — she told Today neither of them felt ready.

"[We were] still trying to figure out between the two of us how to be in partnership, right, and in regards to how do we present that to people. And we hadn't figured that out."

In a separate interview with People magazine, she said they were still weren't 100 per cent sure what their relationship would look like going forward.

"We've been doing some really heavy-duty work together. We just got deep love for each other and we are going to figure out what that looks like for us," she explained.

To People, she also spoke about one of the most publicised moments of her life: the 2022 Oscars slap in which Smith slapped Rock after he made a G.I. Jane joke at Pinkett Smith's expense.

Even she, like most viewers watching at home and from the audience, believed it was a skit at first.

"I thought, 'This is a skit,'" she recalled.

"I was like, 'There's no way that Will hit him'. It wasn't until Will started to walk back to his chair that I even realised it wasn't a skit."

She said that when the two were finally alone — after Smith went on to win Best Actor and deliver a tearful speech — her first words were "are you okay?"

"I'm going to be by his side, but also allow him to have to figure this out for himself."

In her memoir, which will be released on October 17, Pinkett Smith will also discuss her difficult childhood in Baltimore and being raised by a teen mother, her acting career and her relationship with Tupac.

Feature image: Getty.

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