*Speaking at the Sundance Film Festival this week, Jada Pinkett Smith spoke about why she almost quit acting and the new career path she nearly embarked on.
As reported by RollingOut, the 47-year-old actress admitted she lost her “desire” for acting after a while in the biz, and considered stepping away from the spotlight in order to go back to school and study psychology.
“There were no questions in my early years. Maybe later on. I kind of lost my desire to be in this industry for a lot of different reasons, and I was actually thinking about going back to school for psychology,” she said.
The “Girls Trip” star ultimately decided to stick it out because she had accomplished so much already. Instead, she took a short break until she felt “motivated” enough to take on another movie role, the report states.
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“I was like, you’ve been doing this a long time, girl. Just sit back. I just had to wait until I was motivated again. I had to wait until something came along and sparked me because I had just lost the desire to be in this game.”
Smith previously revealed on an episode of her Facebook Watch show “Red Table Talk” that she had a “complete emotional collapse” after she reached “a certain amount of success.”
“I had gotten to LA and gotten a certain amount of success and realized that that wasn’t the answer. It wasn’t what was going to make everything OK. [It] actually made this worse. I was extremely suicidal, I had a complete emotional collapse,” she said.
“It’s like when you just don’t have control over emotions, your thoughts, you feel completely and utterly out of control. I don’t even think at that particular time I understood what I was going through.”
In related news, Apple made its first deal at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival on Monday, with the acquisition of Jada’s coming-of-age drama, “Hala.”
Per Tech Crunch:
Written and directed by Minhal Baig, and executive produced by Jada Pinkett Smith, the film tells the story of a 17-year-old girl, Hala, raised in a conservative Muslim household, who develops feelings for a classmate that puts her at odds with her traditional upbringing. The girl, played by Geraldine Viswanathan (“Blockers”), will also find herself grappling with the knowledge of a secret that threatens to unravel her family, according to a description of the film’s plot.
