Baffling twist in Will Smith, Jada Pinkett Smith marriage drama

In all the bombshell revelations surrounding Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith’s marriage recently, there’s a significant detail we apparently missed.

Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith are apparently trying to save their marriage. Picture: Lionel Hahn/Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Jada Pinkett Smith has clarified the status of her marriage to Will Smith, just days after Hollywood was rocked by news that the A-list couple had secretly separated seven years ago.

After embarking on a whirlwind publicity blitz which saw her share plenty of intimate details about their relationship ahead of the release of her memoir, Worthy, the actress has now appeared to walk back claims that they have called it quits.

In a new interview with the US Today show, Pinkett Smith, 55, claimed that people had initially “missed” the point that she was trying to make – and that she and Smith are actually “working very hard” at saving their marriage.

“We are working very hard at bringing our relationship, yes, bringing our relationship back together … Back to a life partnership, yes,” she told host Hoda Kotb.

“Husband-wife marriage for me, for my healing process. I came into that with very specific ideas, right? Very specific ideas that were blocks. To me just seeing Will to who he is. He can’t be this perfect idealised husband.

“I have to be able to accept him for the human he is. He accepts me for the human that I am, and we want to love each other there. We really have been working hard.”

There’s been some confusion over the status of their marriage. Picture: Lionel Hahn/Getty Images

The Girls Trip star’s revelation clearly stunned Kotb, who replied confusedly: “Oh! OK. Well … I didn’t know that.”

“That’s the point I was trying to tell you,” Pinkett Smith continued. “You totally missed that. That’s the whole thing.”

Kotb then asked: “There might not be a divorce, in theory, anymore?” to which the actress responded: “Yeah. No. We really have been working hard.”

The host then pushed further in an apparent bid to straighten up the facts once and for all.

“So, wait. Just so I’m 100 per cent sure … You were divorced not on paper?”

“Right,” Pinkett Smith told her.

The estranged pair, pictured here in 2015, are apparently trying to fix their marriage. Picture: Kevin Winter/Getty Images

The follow-up interview with Kotb comes just days after the Nutty Professor actress stunned fans with the truth about her marriage to Smith.

After initially revealing their separation to People magazine last week, Pinkett Smith then shared more details of the split with Kotb on NBC News, explaining why the marriage had broken down.

“By the time we got to 2016, we were just exhausted with trying,” the star admitted.

“I think we were both still stuck in our fantasy of what we thought the other person should be.”

Pinkett Smith added that she never wanted to get divorced from Smith.

“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.”

She also debunked persistent rumours that Smith may be secretly gay.

“I mean, a million things were out there,” Pinkett Smith told host Kotb.

“No. You know, that’s part of it. I would say that none of that’s true. I definitely can understand why there’d be misunderstandings,” she added, “but none of it’s true.”

They secretly separated back in 2016. Picture: Kevin Winter/Getty Images

Meanwhile, with the spotlight firmly fixed on his personal life, Smith himself finally responded to his estranged wife’s announcement this week.

In an email to the New York Times, Smith, 55, admitted that her series of bombshells “kind of woke him up” to the fact that she is more “resilient, clever and compassionate than [he’d] understood”, and that he’d developed “emotional blindness” to her “hidden nuances”.

“When you’ve been with someone for more than half of your life a sort of emotional blindness sets in, and you can all too easily lose your sensitivity to their hidden nuances and subtle beauties,” the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air star told the Times.

The Hollywood stars married in 1997 and were considered one of the strongest couples in showbiz in the years that followed.

They share two children, Jaden, 25, and Willow, 22, while Smith also has son, Trey, 30, from his first marriage.

Originally published as Baffling twist in Will Smith, Jada Pinkett Smith marriage drama