Broadway fans will be thrilled to hear that Nathan Lane has been approached to write a memoir, but it might not be as juicy as some of the tell-alls we’ve seen recently. As the actor put it on Late Night with Seth Meyers, “I don’t have many bombshells like Jada Pinkett Smith revealing she and Will Smith have been secretly separated for seven years. ... As the kids would say, WTF!”
Pinkett Smith’s nearly inescapable press tour for her memoir, Worthy, has been chock full of revelations—including the shocking fact that she and Smith have apparently remained married in spite of a longstanding separation.
“Will and I had pictures in our mind of what a happily married couple was,” Pinkett-Smith writes in the book. “And our pictures didn’t match. Inevitably, we came to the proverbial stage of irreconcilable differences. That realization became starkly apparent by 2016.”
Although the two had tried more than once to salvage their marriage, Pinkett Smith added, “We were tired from not finding a middle ground. We’d been on a seesaw for too long.”
On Thursday’s Late Night, Lane marveled at how well the couple has covered up their marital rift through the years. “They work together, they raised the children, they attended events as a couple,” he said before venturing a guess as to how they pulled it off: “It seems like maybe it was a secret even from them!”
Given the Smith revelations, Lane quipped, “I started to wonder maybe my husband and I are secretly separated here. All this time I just thought he was in the other room watching bad reality shows. I guess I won't figure it out until he gets up and slaps someone at the Tony Awards.”
Speaking of The Slap, Pinkett Smith’s press tour has given us additional context for that incident as well: Apparently, Chris Rock asked her out when he heard about the separation and thought they were getting a divorce.
“So he called me and basically he was like, ‘I'd love to take you out,’” Pinkett Smith told People. “And I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ He was like, ‘Well, aren't you and Will getting a divorce?’ I was like, ‘No. Chris, those are just rumors.’ He was appalled. And he profusely apologized and that was that.”
For more, listen to Nathan Lane on The Last Laugh podcast.