Jada Pinkett Smith: 'I was a drug dealer' when I first met Tupac Shakur

— -- Jada Pinkett Smith is giving more details about her friendship with late rapper Tupac Shakur.

In an interview with SiriusXM’s "Sway in the Morning," the actress revealed that when she and Shakur first met, she was a drug dealer.

"It’s kinda hard because I haven't really told the whole story," she said. "One of the things that's very interesting that I've never really said before is that when I first met Pac, when we first met, I was a drug dealer. Yes."

At that time, she added, she was "coming out of that life" and he was "getting more into the life."

"There was a point in which we met and then we kind of were going our separate ways. And I just felt like, 'OK God, one day you're going to do for Pac what you did for me, which is you saved me. And that just never happened for him. And so that is something that I am constantly having to confront," she said. "I know that most people wanna always connect us in this romance thing, but that's just because they don't have the story. But it was based in survival, how we held each other down, you know what I’m saying? And when we have somebody that has your back when you feel like you're nothing, that's everything."

Shakur was 25 years old when he was shot and killed in 1996. Last month, on what would have been the rapper's forty-sixth birthday, Pinkett Smith, 45, slammed the Shakur biopic "All Eyez On Me" as "deeply hurtful" and a "re-imagining of my relationship to Pac." In her interview with Sway on Wednesday, she added that recently, it's become more important to her for people to understand the friendship they had.

"I just decided that one little piece was important to share finally because it gives more insight to who we were that it wasn't just about, 'You have this cute girl and this cool guy they must have been in this [romance]!' Nah. It wasn’t that at all," she said. "It was about survival and it's always been about survival between us, you know what I’m saying? And holding each other down in ways that he and I could hold each other down."