Jada Pinkett Smith had an impressive start to her career, starring in films like The Nutty Professor and Scream 2. However, she recently revealed that hitting the big time wasn't the key to happiness for her.
In an emotional episode of Red Table Talk, the star’s Facebook Watch series, the 47-year-old claimed she became "extremely suicidal" when she first found fame.
Describing her "nervous breakdown", she said: "I had gotten to LA and gotten a certain amount of success and realised that that wasn’t the answer. [The success] wasn’t what was going to make everything okay. [It] actually made this worse. I was extremely suicidal, I had a complete emotional collapse."
The mother of Jaden and Willow went onto admit that she didn't know what was happening to her at the time.
"It’s like when you just don’t have control over emotions, your thoughts, you feel completely and utterly out of control," she said. "I don’t even think at that particular time I understood what I was going through. Now I know that it was what people would consider a nervous breakdown."
The Bad Moms star's comments come after she spoke about her battle with severe depression in a teaser trailer for the episode.
Speaking to her 18-year-old daughter, Willow, and her mother, Adrienne Banfield-Jones, she confessed she battled with her mental health for years.
"I was severely depressed, severely, and that was something I battled with for years," she said. "Waking up in the morning was the worst part of the day, and would take me hours just to get into [it] … by the time the evening time came, I was at least like, 'ok, I’m good'. But then you go to sleep again and then you gotta… you gotta restart."
Red Table Talk has been full of confessions for Jada; in an earlier episode, she revealed she cried on her wedding day because she "never wanted to be married".
Talking candidly about marrying her husband of 20 years, Will Smith, she claimed she realised her life was "never going to be the same" when she tied the knot.
"It was almost as if [my mother, Adrienne Banfield-Jones] was like, 'You have to get married.' I was under so much pressure being a young actress. Being young, pregnant… I just didn’t know what to do. But I knew I never wanted to be married," she said. "I was so upset that I had to have a wedding. I was so pissed. I went crying down the freaking aisle. I cried the whole way down the aisle!"
In addition, her and her famous husband have spoken openly on the show about the day their "marriage came crashing down", with Will claiming they had to "destroy our marriage," as a way of repairing their relationship.
Full episodes of Red Table Talk can be viewed here.
