Jada Pinkett Smith was once so intoxicated that she “passed out” at work. The 49-year-old actress made the stunning confession on the July 7 episode of her Facebook Watch show, Red Table Talk. The mom-of-two revealed that she once lost consciousness in her makeup trailer on The Nutty Professor shoot, the 1996 comedy starring Eddie Murphy. Jada played the comedian’s love interest.
“That was an eye opening incident for me as well,” she told her mom Adrienne Banfield-Norris and daughter Willow Smith. “I had one incident on Nutty Professor. I passed out. Makeup trailer.” “I went to work high and it was a bad batch of ecstasy,” Jada added. “And I passed out and I told everybody that I must have had old medication in a vitamin bottle.”
Jada’s confession came during a candid chat about alcoholism and women drinking more than ever. At the beginning of the show the actress told her stunned co-hosts that she was a hard core boozer back in high school and that her partying continued when she moved from Baltimore to Los Angeles in 1990.
“I was drinking hard in high school too and when I got out here I was doing cocktails. So ecstasy, alcohol, weed,” Jada said, before adding, “Let me tell you I was having me a little ball. I was like, this is not cocaine. This is not heroin. I wasn’t doing things that I thought was addictive but I would do those three together.
“That was my cocktail. Your threshold becomes so high that what it takes for you to get to the place you need to get to, it’ll take me two bottles to… OK, if I do ecstasy, alcohol and weed at the same time, I’m going to get there faster. And I can keep the high going because then I can just keep drinking because I know ecstasy’s going to last me about three, four, five hours. The weed… that’s just going to keep me just smooth and then the alcohol’s going to keep it going.”
Jada said she later switched to drinking wine, buying into the belief that it is “good for you.” “But drinking red wine for me was like drinking glasses of water,” said the actress who admitted that she could drink “almost anybody under the table.”
Jada said she eventually stopped drinking “cold turkey.” “Once I was going for that third bottle of wine I said, ‘You’ve got a problem,’” she said without specifying exactly when she had this revelation. Despite admitting to having the occasional glass of wine over the years, Jada said she no longer drinks vodka or dark liquor.
Substance abuse runs in Jada’s family. Her mom used to be a heroin addict and her paternal grandmother was a binge drinker, according to Adrienne. That’s why Jada said she cautions her children Willow, 20, Jaden, 22, and stepson Trey, 28, about taking “mind altering” substances.
She said that when she was in her 20s, actress and director Debbie Allen was that voice of reason in her life. “Don’t think that people didn’t try to tap me on my shoulder,” Jada told Willow. “Don’t think that when I was at Debbie Allen’s throwing up all over her house… that she wasn’t like, ‘Hey.’ But I had to reach my rock bottoms.” Now the former weekend “party girl” who admitted to being “out of control” said she sees herself as a “walking miracle.”
Red Table Talk airs on Facebook Watch on Wednesdays at 9am PT/12pm ET. You can see the June 30 episode in full above.