Jada Pinkett Smith is getting candid about her approach to sex scenes on camera.
“No nudity,” she said on Lena Waithe’s Lemonada Media podcast Legacy Talk. “That was always the case for me.”
Pinkett Smith, 53, has appeared in such racy movies as Magic Mike XXL and Girls Trip, but it was in the 1996 heist drama Set It Off that she navigated intimacy on screen and “separating the character from herself,” she said.
Waithe, 40, asked about shooting the F. Gary Gray-directed hit, costarring Queen Latifah, Vivica A. Fox and Kimberly Elise, before film sets had intimacy coordinators to choreograph sex scenes and keep actors safe. “It was a very different time,” responded Pinkett Smith, “but luckily enough, all of the men that [I] ever engaged with in that way were so respectful and took such good care of me. And even the directors did as much as they could to have as much privacy that they knew to have at that time.”
She recalled the scene in which her character, Lida “Stony” Newsome, used sex “to get money for my brother’s college,” as “being so difficult.” But Gray and his team, she added, were “making sure that only the necessary people were on the set.”
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For Waithe, Set It Off “had a great impact” both on herself and on her filmmaking career, she said. “There’s no Queen & Slim without Set It Off,” she said referencing her 2019 heist movie. “I remember seeing it at the movie theater. And I always say this: When we walked out of that theater, we were different. That’s how powerful that is.”
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Produced by Waithe’s company Hillman Grad, Legacy Talk is distributed by Lemonada Media. On the podcast, the Emmy-winning Master of None writer-star interviews Black artists to discuss key milestones in their lives and careers.
In her interview, Pinkett Smith also discussed her other hit movies, joining The Cosby Show spin-off sitcom A Different World midway through its run in 1991 and her approach to choosing roles in Hollywood. “I’ve always wanted to show all the different multifaceted ways in which a Black woman can exist,” she said.
“It’s very easy to pigeonhole all of us,” she continued. “But I’ve always wanted to really express the expansiveness of the soul through film and television and eventually music. I always had this thing where I wanted to show the heart, the spirit, and the soul of Black womanhood.”
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