Please Rewind Talent Wall

Jada Pinkett Smith

Jada Pinkett Smith has built a screen career around energy, resolve and characters who rarely fade into the background. Born in Baltimore on September 18, 1971, she studied acting and dance at the Baltimore School for the Arts before beginning her television career in 1990. Her role as Lena James on A Different World became an important early break, giving her a place in an established ensemble while letting her play a character who, like Pinkett Smith, came from Baltimore. Her early film work quickly showed her range. She played single mother Ronnie in Menace II Society, brought attitude and comic momentum to A Low Down Dirty Shame, and starred opposite Allen Payne in the romantic drama Jason’s Lyric. Set It Off gave her one of her defining 1990s roles, placing her alongside Queen Latifah, Vivica A. Fox and Kimberly Elise in a crime drama about four women driven to bank robbery by poverty. Pinkett Smith later moved comfortably between intimate drama, broad comedy, action and voice work. She appeared as Sonji Roi in Ali and took on the role of human rebel Niobe in The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions. In Please Rewind’s The Matrix Revolutions, Niobe is an assured fit for Pinkett Smith’s direct, grounded presence: a capable figure inside a story operating on an enormous science-fiction scale. Her voice became just as recognizable through Gloria, the confident and warm hippopotamus in Madagascar and its sequels. Elsewhere, she played Fish Mooney in Gotham, joined the ensemble comedies Magic Mike XXL, Bad Moms and Girls Trip, and starred in and executive produced the medical drama Hawthorne. Pinkett Smith’s work has also extended behind the camera. She directed music videos in the 1990s, then wrote, directed and acted in the 2008 drama The Human Contract. As a producer, executive producer, presenter and host, she has continued to move between film and television rather than settling into one lane. Across those roles, her strongest performances tend to draw on the same qualities: composure, edge and a sense that the character has a life beyond the frame.