Will Smith may seem as if he’s the epitome of confidence, but the actor recently admitted wife Jada Pinkett Smith’s years-long friendship with Tupac Shakur made him jealous.
The "Bad Boys for Life" actor made the candid confession during a stop on "The Breakfast Club" radio show earlier this week.
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“That was in the early days,” said Smith, who was joined by his co-star Martin Lawrence. “That was a big regret for me, too, because I could never open up to interact with Pac.”
Pinkett Smith and Shakur attended Maryland's Baltimore School of the Arts as teenagers. She explained in an episode of Facebook Watch's "Red Table Talk" the pair had a "complex relationship" and that Pac would be protective over her as she dated.
She said that complexity emerged “in those moments of his, ‘Who’s that?!’” despite the fact that “there ain’t nothing like that between us.”
Regardless of a lack of romance between the classmates, Smith explained that with Pinkett Smith and Shakur’s history, they’d “come into an age where now that was a possibility and then Jada was with me.”
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“So Pac had a little thing on that, but she just loved him like he was the image of perfection, but she was with the Fresh Prince,” he continued. “We were in the room together a couple of times and I couldn’t speak to him. You know, he wasn’t going to speak to me if I wasn’t going to speak to him.”
Smith admitted his wife told him he and Pac had lots in common, but the movie star couldn’t get past his jealousy to learn more about the rapper.
He called it “a huge regret of mine.”
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“I was deeply, deeply insecure, and I wasn’t man enough to handle that relationship,” Smith said.
Shakur was fatally shot in 1996, and Pinkett Smith has remarked on “Red Table Talk” about how much anger his death caused her to feel.
"(H)e was one of those people I expected to be here," she said. "My upset is more anger because I feel like he left me. I know that's not true and it's a very selfish way to think about it ... I really did believe he'd be here for the long run. And when I think about it I still get really mad."
