Jada Pinkett Smith’s alcohol and substance abuse issues were so out of control while shooting 1996 film “The Nutty Professor,” she hit a low and passed out.
The actress opened up about her problems on Wednesday’s episode of her family chat show “Red Table Talk,” admitting she would knock back bottles of red wine while taking ecstasy and smoking marijuana.
“Drinking red wine for me was like drinking glasses of water…,” she told her daughter Willow Smith and mother Adrienne Banfield-Norris. “I was drinking hard in high school, too, and when I got out here (to Los Angeles) I was doing cocktails. So, ecstasy, alcohol, weed. Let me tell you, I was having myself a little ball.
“I wasn’t doing things that I thought were 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 get to… (I’d say), ‘OK, if I do ecstasy, weed and alcohol at the same time I’m gonna get there faster and I can keep the high going’.”
She added, “I wasn’t the type of person who was drinking every day; I was like a weekend party girl. Thursday to Monday morning, I would go.”
But that all changed after an embarrassing slip-up on a film set.
“I went to work high and it was a bad batch of ecstasy,” she recalls. “And I passed out and I told everybody that I must have had old medication in a vitamin bottle. But I’ll tell you what I did, though. I got my a** together and got on that set. That was the last time.
“Once I was going for that third bottle of wine, and I said, ‘You’ve got a problem’, and it was cold turkey that day. That day I just stopped.”
Jada Pinkett Smith confessed she’s glad that her daughter Willow isn’t dabbling in anything but weed: “I’m grateful that that’s all you’re dealing with because when I was your age, I was doing it all,” she said.