Why You Rarely Hear From Jaden Smith Anymore

Jaden Smith is an actor, a singer, a fashion icon, an entrepreneur, and more. Like other child actors who shared the screen with their parents, Smith first got into the acting business because of his father, Will Smith. Their movie "The Pursuit of Happyness" helped ignite the young Smith's career in 2006, but oddly enough, the next movie they did together, 2013's "After Earth," completely changed the course of Smith's life again. Now he's a former child star that Hollywood wants nothing to do with, but that's only helping him to work even harder.

Smith has taken on a handful of roles in TV shows and movies since 2013, but he's largely put acting on the backburner. If you only knew him through his dad, you might have lost track of Smith over the past decade. But he's actually been busy with so many different projects that it's hard to follow. Smith is opening businesses, starting new relationships, crafting Grammy-worthy music, and making waves in the world of fashion. As much as Smith's family has been in the headlines since 2013, Smith himself has managed, to a degree, to fly under the radar. If you weren't already a fan, you will be once you find out why you've rarely heard from Jaden Smith since he started shifting away from acting.

For a while it seemed like Jaden Smith might follow in his father's footsteps and become a famous actor. Unsurprisingly, Smith started acting when he was incredibly young: his first TV role in the show "All of Us" came in 2003, when he was just five years old. Three years later he starred in "The Pursuit of Happyness" with his father, and his acting career was off to a solid start.

Almost 20 years later, Hollywood has basically stopped casting Smith, and if you've avidly followed his acting work, you probably already know why that is. After an initially promising start, Smith's career took a downward turn pretty quickly. 2008's "The Day the Earth Stood Still" was the first film he did without his dad, and it bombed with critics. Two years later Smith was in a remake of "The Karate Kid," which received mixed reviews and didn't help launch Smith's career to new heights. 

His very next film was the disastrous "After Earth," which financially performed well enough but was completely shredded by critics. Smith himself has some acting chops and gives some good performances in these movies, but he started moving away from acting once "After Earth" bombed, and Hollywood didn't seem to mind. 

Jaden Smith hasn't been very active as an actor in quite some time, but he's been finding ways to keep busy that also make a positive impact on people's lives. Like many celebrities, Smith has gotten involved in philanthropy, and back in 2019 he started a project that helps people on multiple fronts. I Love You Restaurant is a food truck that focuses on making healthy, vegan food, but the truck is designed for one very specific kind of customer: It shows up in various parts of Los Angeles to serve the homeless for free.

The restaurant had its opening day on L.A.'s Skid Row for Smith's 21st birthday. The truck continued popping up throughout 2019, serving hundreds of people in the process, but then the pandemic hit. The I Love You Restaurant had to shut down, but Smith managed to get the restaurant reopened in 2022. Since then, its mission hasn't changed, but Smith's goals have gotten even bigger. He's planning on someday securing an actual location for the restaurant to make I Love You a permanent fixture in Skid Row, and he revealed in 2024 that he's also working on another company that will have a positive impact by using recycled trash to create furniture.

As Jaden Smith's career has been changing, so has his personal life. Smith's fans have been following his relationship with a model named Sab Zada for years. Rumors that the two of them were dating first started circulating in 2020 after a photo surfaced of them holding hands on their way to a movie. Smith didn't acknowledge the relationship publicly for a long time, even as more paparazzi photos of the two of them together started making their way online.

In February 2024, Smith seemingly admitted that he and Zada were dating when he posted some pictures of the two of them together on X, formerly Twitter. Smith's post didn't really explain much about his relationship, so fans were left guessing and got even more confused in August when Smith was seen kissing another model, Khleopatre. 

People speculated that Smith and Zada must have broken up. In October, instead of giving a straightforward comment on the situation, Smith released "2024: A Case Study on the Long Term Effects of Young Love," a collection of four songs about love and heartbreak. That's probably the closest anyone will get to an answer about how Smith's relationship with Zada turned out, but it's not hard for fans to read between the lines.

Even among the children of Hollywood stars, Jaden Smith stands out because of just how famous his family is. Smith has spent basically his entire life in the Hollywood limelight, and in recent years, there's been quite a bit of Smith family drama in the headlines. Fans haven't always been able to suss out how Smith has been feeling, but the few hints they've gotten have made it clear all the attention has taken a toll on him.

In 2021, we learned from Will Smith's memoir that Jaden has sometimes had a difficult relationship with his parents. "After Earth" was one of Will Smith's worst career moments, and the film put a major strain on the bond between Will and Jaden. Not long after the film tanked, 15-year-old Jaden asked to be legally emancipated from his parents. He ultimately didn't go through with that decision, but he did move out of his parents' home in 2016 after he turned 18.

In 2022, the Smith family was in the spotlight again after Will slapped Chris Rock on stage at the Oscars. At the time, Jaden posted on X, "And That's How We Do It," which most people assumed was a comment about the slap. A little over a year later, Jada Pinkett Smith revealed that she and her husband had been separated since 2016. Jaden didn't openly comment on his mother's big reveal, but a source close to both Smith children told ET Online they were relieved to have the truth in the open — although the source added, "They wish some of their family's private matters remained private."

Through his acting, music, and even his philanthropic side projects, Jaden Smith is always working to express himself. To that end, he's also been developing a personal style that over the years has become pretty iconic. Smith has a tendency to wear eye-catching clothing that defies gender norms, and as a young adult he made such a habit of wearing traditionally women's clothing that in January 2016 he started a partnership with Louis Vuitton to promote the company's womenswear line.

That same year, Smith launched his very own clothing line called MSFTSrep. At the time, Smith told Variety that while he was growing up, "I could tell I felt about life differently than other kids; I could tell by the way they treated me." He said that he hoped his own line of clothing could connect to kids who felt the same way he did: "If someone at your school's trying to pick on you, it doesn't matter because Jaden Smith's got your back."

Smith has worn skirts, dresses, and even once turned heads by showing up to the 2017 Met Gala in heels. People have celebrated the fact that Smith's sense of style challenges gender norms, and a writer for The Independent even called him a "non-binary icon." Smith himself seems to think about his clothing choices in an even more straightforward way. As he wrote on X in 2018, "If I Wanna Wear A Dress, Then I Will, And That Will Set The New Wave..."

There are plenty of famous singers who became actors, but Jaden Smith has gone in the opposite direction. For over a decade, he's kept up a steady stream of new releases ever since making his musical debut with the 2012 mixtape "The Cool Cafe." Smith was just 14 years old when he released that project, and five years later he followed it up with his debut album, "Syre."

Smith told Billboard that he first started working on his album when he was 16 years old, saying, "It really is the story of me coming to be a young adult, and it wasn't easy at all." At the time Smith said he was inspired by Kanye West to work with as many talented musicians as possible. The album is primarily a coming-of-age story, but it also gave Smith a platform to address bigger issues, like police brutality and his own feelings about misogyny in rap lyrics.

"Syre" was just the beginning of Smith's full-fledged dive into the music industry. Since then he's continued collaborating with other artists and working on his own music. He's also taken a more personal approach with his work as time has gone on. In another interview with Billboard, Smith said that his "2024: A Case Study on the Long Term Effects of Young Love" project was his way of dealing with heartbreak. "I'm going through emotional things, dealing with those experiences and feeling overwhelmed," Smith said, adding, "Like I don't know what to do, but that's when I get into the studio."

One of Jaden Smith's closest friends and musical collaborators is Justin Bieber. Their creative relationship dates all the way back to 2010, when Bieber released the single "Never Say Never," which featured Smith.  That song got included in the soundtrack for Smith's movie "The Karate Kid," and later the two of them performed the song together at the 2011 Grammy Awards ceremony. Bieber was 16 years old at the time, and Smith was only 11, but the song was a massive hit that eventually hit the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 and reached over a billion plays on YouTube. 

That was the last time that Smith and Bieber performed together at the Grammys, but it wasn't the last time they got some joint recognition at the awards. In 2022, Bieber earned Grammy nominations for Album of the Year, Record of the Year, and Song of the Year. Smith was featured on Bieber's album "Justice," so he got to celebrate that moment as his very first Grammy nomination. Fans got to see the two of them together again when they were spotted palling around at Coachella in 2024, but they're still waiting for the next Bieber and Smith collaboration.

Not a day goes by without somebody starting a new celebrity rumor online, and some of them have at least a tiny hint of truth to them. But on January 23, 2023, Jaden Smith was the subject of a short-lived internet rumor that had absolutely no basis in reality: a number of websites posing as news outlets started reporting that Smith had died. 

The fake articles picked up enough traction that there was a noticeable rise in people going to Google to check whether or not Smith was still alive. There were some warning signs that people probably should have picked up on, like the fact that many of the headlines about Smith's death referred to him as being 15 years old (he was 24 at the time) or the fact that the websites were filled with spam ads and download offers.

Like a handful of other huge celebrity deaths that turned out to be completely fake, Smith's "death" rocked the internet for about 24 hours. Eventually enough people checked the truth for themselves that the rumor just fizzled out on its own. Smith never publicly commented on the hoax, but having spent basically his entire life in the limelight, he's probably used to this kind of thing by now.

Jaden Smith rarely acts anymore, but it's not something that's he's willing to entirely abandon just yet. The last time most people saw Smith was when he starred in the disastrous 2013 movie "After Earth," but since then he's had a number of small roles in strange places. Just a few years after that major box office bomb, Smith joined the cast of "The Get Down" as a guest star for nearly a dozen episodes. He also made the jump into voice acting in 2017 as a cast member on the series "Neo Yokio."

Smith's acting appearances have become even more sparse as the years have gone on, but the movies he's choosing are also being much more warmly received than the projects he took on when he was still just a kid. In 2020, Smith starred alongside Cara Delevigne in "Life in a Year," which has the third-highest Rotten Tomatoes audience score of any of his films. Smith's most critically successful film was 2022's "Entergalactic," an animated musical with a whopping 97% approval rating at the review aggregation site.

For the most part, Smith's IMDb page is overwhelmed with music videos, and even his movies tend to have some tie-in to the music industry. "Entergalactic," for example, was written in part by rap artist Kid Cudi. Smith has been extremely selective with his acting roles since "After Earth," but it really seems like that's been for the best.

One of the things that Jaden Smith's fans love about him is that they never quite know what he's going to do next. Maybe he'll join the cast of a TV show, do a featured track for a good friend, or suddenly drop an EP about heartbreak. He might start a vegan food truck business or a company building recycled furniture. Whatever he does, fans know that he's chasing his own passions. 

Back in November 2023, Smith gave his fans a tantalizing, albeit somewhat confusing, update on his work and personal life when he wrote on X, "Actively Working On Being More Weird." From the strange capitalization to the intriguing vagueness, that post perfectly captured what Smith has been up to in recent years. In October 2024, Smith was promoting his latest musical release when an interviewer for Complex asked him about that old post. Throughout the interview, Smith avoided answering questions by replying with quotes from the movie "Twilight," but the subject of weirdness was important enough to him to answer. 

"Sometimes it's so frustrating to watch people try to follow the 'normal' thing to do when that's not what they really want to do in their art and everything," he said. "And then you see people fall into it and generations of people fall into it. So I actively try to be myself." Smith's pursuit of weirdness is kind of like his pursuit of fashion or music: It's all about trying to fully be himself in a way that inspires his fans and people like him to do the same.