Will Smith and Jada Pinkett's bizarre marriage arrangement revealed

Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith are continuing to live in separate homes, though insiders insist the pair are still together.

The I Am Legend actor, 56, and the Matrix star, 53, are 'are living their own lives but haven't completely severed ties,' a source told People on Thursday.

'Call it what you want,' the source added. Meanwhile, another inside said the pair, who got married in 1997, are 'still together' but 'have had separate homes for years.'

In 2023 it was reported that Jada has her own house nearby to Will in Calabasas. 

Smith is also said to be 'a bit disillusioned with Hollywood' at the moment the first source shared, adding that it could 'all change with some new success.'

The pair have been working on their relationship after Jada disclosed in 2023 that they had been separated for seven years, beginning in 2016.

'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 shared at the time. 

Jada previously shared that she will live with Will again one day to 'take care of him' because he's 'getting old' in a 2023 interview with The Times. 

While promoting her memoir Worthy on the Today show in 2023 she gave insight into her marital woes and told host Hoda Kotb that the marriage had left them 'exhausted.' 

'I think by the time we got to 2016 we were just exhausted with trying,' Pinkett Smith said on the broadcast.

'I think we were both kind of just still stuck in our fantasy of what we thought the other person should be,' she explained of what caused them to drift apart.

In Pinkett Smith's book, Worthy, she describes the separation as a 'divorce,' but clarified they never filed any paperwork.

'It was not a divorce on paper. But it was a divorce,' Pinkett Smith said.

The mother-of-two - who admitted in 2020 that she'd had an affair with singer August Alsina - said she considered a legal divorce but could never go through with it, candidly revealing that she made a 'promise' to her husband that she would never give him a 'reason' to get divorced. 

She noted that no permanent decisions have been made about the future of her marriage, explaining that she and Will are 'still figuring it out'.

That year she also shared that 'there have been several breakups between Will and I' during their marriage, as she appeared on an episode of the On Purpose with Jay Shetty podcast.

Meanwhile the actor wrote in in 2021 memoir Will, that there were times in their marriage when they were both 'miserable and clearly something had to change.' 

Jada later revealed how the pair found their way back to each other after Will infamously slapped comedian Chris Rock during the 2022 Oscars. 

The confrontation took place after Rock made a joke about Pinkett Smith's shaved head, prompting Will to make his way to the stage, slap the presenter and say 'keep my wife's name out of your f**king mouth.'. 

'That was a moment that I knew I would never leave Will’s side after all those years thinking I would,' she told Extra. 

'I didn’t go in there as his wife, but I was leaving as his wife,' she added. 

'You know, it's funny how intense situations can amplify love, and it was a pretty difficult time, but it definitely drew us closer. So yeah, it's crazy how things work.' 

While speaking to Daily Mail's YOU Magazine, Pinkett Smith said 'many positive things came after' Smith slapped Rock.

'After all those years trying to figure out if I would leave Will's side, it took that slap for me to see I will never leave him. Who knows where our relationship would be if that hadn't happened?'

After Jada spoke publicly about their marital estrangement, Smith followed up with his own comments on the situation.

In an email published in the New York Times, he said her comments on their relationship were a wake-up call to him, adding that she was more 'resilient, clever and compassionate' than he'd realized.

The King Richard star told the paper, '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 two were last seen in November 2024, as they stepped out for dinner with Shetty in Los Angeles. 

In May 2024, they made their first red carpet appearance since her news of their prior separation. 

She supported Will at the Bad Boys: Ride or Die premiere in Los Angeles.

They were joined by their two kids, son Jaden, 26, and daughter Willow, 24, as well as Will's older son Trey, 32, whom he shares with ex-wife Sheree Zampino.

Jada's mother Adrienne Banfield-Norris was also present. 

Jada's marriage to Will previously came under blistering public scrutiny in 2020, when she interviewed him on her chat show Red Table Talk about an 'entanglement' she had four years earlier with Alsina, who is 21 years her junior.