Jada Pinkett Smith needed to win over the cast of former NBC sitcom A Different World when she joined the show in 1991.

The Girls Trip actress was on the latest episode of Legacy Talk with Lena Waithe, where she started from the beginning, reflecting on her breakout role in A Different World season five. The show was a spinoff of the 8-season sitcom The Cosby Show, of which Denise Huxtable, played by Lisa Bonet, attended historically Black institution Hillman. Waithe, so inspired by the show and her name being similar to Lena James, played by Pinkett Smith, named her media and production company Hillman Grad.

As Pinkett Smith, hired by Debbie Allen, joined the cast three years before the show ended, she also had to impress the cast, who’d already developed their chops after the show began in 1987.

“I was super excited. I was ready to play, for sure. … I was like, ‘I’m here,’” Pinkett said of joining the Different World crew around the 1:45-minute mark of the video below. "There was already this deep camaraderie, you know what I mean? With Kadeem [Hardison] and Jasmine [Guy] and Cree [Summer] and the whole cast.”

Pinkett Smith entered the show with fellow then-newbies Karen Malina White and Ajai Sanders. 

She continued, "We're the new blood, so they were kind of like, 'All right, whatever.' Not in a funky way, but definitely like, ‘Earn your stripes.’”

The 53-year-old recalled not considering herself a “comedic actress,” which made her “nervous” upon the first day of filming.

“So that's what I mean by, when I walked in…earn your stripes,” she said. You’ve gotta be funny, you’ve got to earn your place. You’ve got a live audience and so it wasn't no play-play; everybody had to hold their own.”

But by the end of the series, the character of James completed her sophomore year at Hillman, and the show would launch Pinkett Smith’s career into films like Low Down Dirty Shame, Jason’s Lyric, Menace II Society, Set It Off, The Matrix, The Nutty Professor, and more. The actress last narrated and produced the 2023 docudrama African Queens. Pinkett Smith briefly discussed her time on A Different World in her 2023 memoir Worthy, highlighting an episode where her late childhood friend, rap icon 2Pac, appeared.

Some of the main Different World cast, including Hardison, Guy, Summer, and Dawnn Lewis, reunited for a 10-city HBCU tour earlier this year to introduce the Black college experience to a new generation of prospective students.

A Different World is available to stream on Max.