Jada Pinkett Smith Opens Up About Apologizing to Daughter Willow on Red Table Talk
Jada Pinkett Smith is looking back on a powerful moment during her Red Table Talk.
The actress and host, 48, gathered Demi Moore and her daughters Rumer Willis and Tallulah Willis for a recent special episode of her Facebook Watch show. During the powerful sit-down, Pinkett Smith did some reckoning of her own when she apologized to her daughter Willow, 19, for a misstep she feels she made earlier in her life.
“Sitting there with Rumer and Tallulah, I was like they helped me see an aspect of my interacting with Willow that came upon me in the moment,” Pinkett Smith told PEOPLE at a screening of Hala on Monday night at AFI Fest in Los Angeles. (The film is executive produced by the actress.) “I was like, oh snap, I need to apologize for having denied her a certain amount of closeness. Not allowing her to have her vulnerability at certain points of her life because I was afraid of my own. And I wanted to acknowledge that.”
In the episode, Pinkett Smith apologized to Willow for not allowing her to express feelings of sadness as a child. The topic came up after both Rumer and Tallulah said that Moore had done the same by appearing so strong and put together all the time.
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“Back in the day if I would have been crying or had been upset, the energy was always like, ‘Take that somewhere else,’” Willow said in the episode.
“Because that’s how I was treating myself, I didn’t want to be with my own feelings,” Pinkett Smith replied. “There’s this wall there’s this armor and I was thinking about how it does a disservice to everybody we love. Including ourselves.”
Red Table Talk often inspires healing moments and difficult conversation thanks to its encouragement of total honesty. And though it may seem there is no topic Pinkett Smith won’t discuss, there is one thing she says she will never bring to the table.
“The only thing that I don’t touch at the red table is politics,” Pinkett Smith told PEOPLE. “Because everyone else is doing it, so I like to touch on things that are in regards to the heart, in regard to things that can bring us close and the universal issues in regard to unity and understanding.”
Red Table Talks airs Mondays on Facebook Watch.
