Will Smith gives us the lowdown on how the megasuccess of Independence Day has changed his life--like, now he gets first crack at hot scripts and has to cope with female fans who want him to sign their breasts.
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It's a six-floor elevator ride to the toney offices of Will Smith Enterprises, the wraparound windows of which offer sprawling vistas of a town Smith currently holds in his hip pocket. The Independence Day audience favorite has just moved his headquarters to West Hollywood from the NBC Burbank offices he occupied during six years on the air as "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air," a show he pulled the plug on while it was still a hit. He's moving way on up, as anyone hereabouts will tell you.
Having nailed the showiest scenes in last summer's Godzilla-size sci-fi hit, and having done Men In Black, next summer's potential Godzilla-size sci-fi hit, Smith's a dervish who seems to know exactly when and when not to whirl. Witness: as a rapper partnered with DJ Jazzy Jeff, he iced the cake of three platinum-certified CDs with two Grammy awards, including the first ever awarded for Best Rap Performance (for the 1988 single "Parents Just Don't Understand"). He then promoted his rap persona into a hit television series.
From there, he launched his film career with movies that, one by one, inched him into bigger roles, better reviews and ultimately mind-boggling box office: Where the Day Takes You, Made in America, Six Degrees of Separation, Bad Boys and ID4. He's also made changes on the personal front: 28 and recently divorced from Sheree Zampino, the mother of his four-year-old son, he is keeping company with Jada Pinkett, star of The Nutty Professor and Set It Off, whom he affectionately calls "Miss Jada." No wonder he bounces up to meet me grinning a grin that says ain't-life-grand? His is.
With all the fuss around him, Smith could be forgiven if he resembled the proverbial deer trapped in headlights. Five seconds with him, though, makes it clear that he's the one behind the wheel, not the imminent roadkill. Some Hollywood insiders say he's demanding, cocky, downright relentless about getting what he thinks is right for himself. Maybe, maybe not. Who gets to where he's gotten by going with the flow? One thing is certain: under the charm and glee, this guy's got laser focus. I haven't seen anything quite like it since I last encountered Tom Cruise.
Lately, Smith has gotten a dose of the surreal side of stardom no drama school can ever prepare you for. I ask him to give me some post-_Independence Day_ examples of the craziness, and when he answers, he's obviously choosing from plenty of cases.
"I was in Manhattan making Men In Black and this girl was driving along, saw me and started mouthing over and over, 'Oh, my God. Oh, my God,' then crashed into another car." Smith shakes his head in amazement. "Now, she gets out of her car, but she doesn't say, "Oh. I crashed into the back of a car!' She runs over to me and asks for my autograph. That's when I thought: This is real different. Then, I was at the Virgin Megastore in Manhattan and this girl came up to me, pulled her shirt up and asked me to sign her breasts with a Sharpie. I mean, she's standing there in the middle of the store with her titties hanging out and I'm like, 'Listen, those are really nice breasts, but this is really an inappropriate time and place.' In another store, this toothless 80-year-old lady came up to me, grabbed my face and tried to kiss me right on the lips. I said, 'Now, ma'am, if I walked up to you, grabbed your face and tried to kiss you on the mouth, the cops would give me a Rodney King and take me right to jail.' And she was like, 'Oh, stop being mean. Just give me a kiss,' I mean, geriatric tongue kisses are pretty much out, in my book."
How is Smith handling all this attention?
"I'm pretty good at diffusing potential situations," he says. "But I find myself having to diffuse them a lot more often than before. I heard Sylvester Stallone say once that after he made Rocky, everybody wanted to fight him. Well, every big guy wants to fight me now. They go. 'Yo. I ain't no alien--hit me,' and I'm like, 'I don't want to hit you. I just want to get some cheese from the supermarket to make grilled cheese sandwiches for my son.' Why do people want to fight me? What did I do? I think of myself as a pretty calm, likable guy. It's really weird. I was non-threatening on 'The Fresh Prince,' so nobody wanted to fight me, but then I buffed up for Independence Day, came on a little cocky, and suddenly people want to knock me down. People who know me from TV think I've seen them in their underwear drinking on their couch, so the response is more familiar, more friendly. Film gives you almost god status, you know'? It makes people crazy."
One of Smith's favorite post-mega hit responses came from his own father, Willard Smith Sr., owner of a Philadelphia refrigeration firm, who separated from Will's mother, a school board administrator, when Will was roughly 13. "The Monday the first box-office numbers were announced, he woke me up by calling me from Philly at nine a.m., which made it six a.m. in L.A.," relates Smith, with a laugh. "He'd just seen the numbers and said, 'Boy, you remember when I told you that if you work hard and focus you can have anything you want?' I said. 'Yeah, Dad, I remember,' and then he said, 'That's bullshit, boy. You're the luckiest nigger I ever met in my life.'"
Clearly, Independence Day changed everything for Will Smith. Among other things, now that worldwide audiences have gotten a load of his sculpted pecs and macho flyboy shenanigans, he's suddenly perceived as hot in every respect. If the auspices were right, would he play up his sex appeal and bare his all on camera? Smith rolls his head around like Stevie Wonder, indicating a most emphatic no.
"Men don't have nice fronts," he declares. "Penises aren't attractive. Women think they're functional, but not attractive. In fact, the entire male body is not attractive. As naked as I'll ever be is in Six Degrees of Separation. Maybe I'll do a love scene, but I'm not showing my balls to nobody, I have a 'no balls' clause. I couldn't just take my balls out anywhere like Harvey Keitel. He's like that girl showing me her breasts in the Virgin Megastore. I can see Harvey Keitel in the Virgin Megastore with his balls out trying to get some CDs."
I ask, "But what if a filmmaker held the contractual right to digitally animate your private parts, the way Paul Verhoeven supposedly would've liked to have done with the male lead in Showgirls'?"
"That'd be over the line," he says. "But if you're gonna simulate my balls, I want a really nicely generated set. I want ball approval. But this isn't gonna happen, because men are making the movies and men are going to put in the things they like to see. All women have beautiful bodies. But I'll tell you one thing: Miss Jada better not do that."
Smith's got no quarrel with sexing up his on-screen image, as long as it suits the character--and is done on his terms. "What's sexy about being sexy is not trying," he explains. "Once you become conscious of doing something to specifically be sexy, it's not sexy anymore. I go the other way. Like, when I do a scene, I don't want to do my hair and don't want to put makeup on to specifically try to look sexy. In Independence Day, I worked out and wanted my body to look strong, but I was like, "Nah, let the hair be where it is, Don't put no damn eyeliner on me.'"
Since we're talking sexy, I ask Smith, who attended Catholic school, about how he lost his sexual innocence. "My first sexual experience never really, like, got off the ground," he says, laughing. "It was with my girlfriend in eighth grade. Gosh, I shouldn't have said that--I mean, my girlfriend in eleventh grade. Mom! Anyway, it happened at my house and all, but it just took me, like, 30 minutes to figure out how to get the rubber to work-- sorry, Mom, the prophylactic. I just didn't know how to work it. It was dark, too, and I dropped it and then I had to turn the lights on to find it. Anyway, finally it really didn't...uhmm ...happen, because I got a little ahead of myself. So to speak."
OK. Let's talk about movies. I wonder, have there been juicy parts Smith warned on his way up but lost out on?
"Something I wanted real bad but didn't get was Blair Underwood's role in Just Cause with Sean Connery," Smith tells me. "It was shooting in Miami the same time we were doing Bad Boys. The producers and director said, 'We'll take a meeting, but we already know it's "no." The role's too close to what you did in Six Degrees of Separation.'"
Smith concedes that the days of being rejected are over. "Independence Day pretty much put me inline to be one of the first guys to get the scripts now. For instance, there's a script I've just been offered that if I don't do, they'll probably send to Steve Martin."
Another facet of megasuccess, of course, is megacoverage in the tabloids. How does he think the press is treating him these days?
"There are members of the press who make their living infringing on people's private moments," he replies. "You never know where these people are going to be. They stay outside your house and climb the gates and walk around looking in your windows. Now I've got a bunch of 140-pound Rottweilers. It's just a shame to have to live like that, because I like people so much. Still, you don't know what people will do. You can never feel completely safe. You've got to look around all the time. I'm kind of used to that, being black, watching out for white people coming to get you. Now it's tenfold."
What are the things he most misses doing now that anonymity is a memory?
"I'm having trouble dealing with the concept that you sacrifice your right to courtesy by being a celebrity," he comments. "Because I'm a celebrity, someone is allowed to block my way from getting into my car. If I'm in the middle of a conversation, because I'm a celebrity, someone can come up to me and go. 'Can you sign this?' You're supposed to do the nice thing and sign, because if you don't, it's like, 'He's such an asshole. He doesn't sign autographs.' You're in mid-gulp at a restaurant and people ask you to put down your fork, take some dirty pen that you have no idea of where it's been, sign some filthy piece of paper ripped off a paper bag they found outside, then go back and put your hands in your food."
Still, the tabloids have had next to nothing in the way of juicy revelations about Smith's past love life. How has this former high-rolling rapper and TV star avoided it? Hasn't he ever done a Charlie Sheen?
"There's probably only four women in Los Angeles that have intimate knowledge of Will Smith," he says. "You know, I had my brief period, a short time in my life, but that got real old real quick. I want to love somebody. I just always prefer one woman. The intimacy is so much more enjoyable when it's with someone you love. Because I know I can pretty much have sex with anyone I choose, it becomes less appealing. It's no challenge. A successful relationship is much harder than sleeping with as many women as you can sleep with."
Commitment is a rare attitude, particularly in Hollywood. When I ask him how he came by it, he relates a childhood incident that shaped his response to women in general--and, very possibly, Jada Pinkett in particular. "I was nine and my older sister must have been 15. Some guys pulled a knife on me and took my money when I was coming home from school. I came in crying and my sister asked me why. I told her and she right away grabbed a baseball bat. We walked around for four hours looking for this guy. She had no concern for her own safety. Somebody had done something to her brother and she was going to do everything in her power to make sure they never did it again. We never found the guys, but that type of love and commitment is what I search for. My mother and my grandmother? That same kind of unconditional love. All women have the organs. But that's not what excites me about being in a relationship with women, that's not what makes me feel good. What I want to know is, 'Are you gonna grab a bat when someone steals my money?' Now, Miss Jada's so little, she might need two bats, but she's more than happy to go grab 'em. Outside of our love relationship, she's my best friend, too."
Smith speaks equally lovingly or his son. Although raising a child as a single parent with a booming career is, he admits, "hard sometimes, that's what life is. We have a great relationship. He has a lot of the spirit I was born with, which is, 'Hey, look, I'm happy to be alive.' And he loves Miss Jada. There's three things you can give your children 100 percent of: love, discipline and knowledge. That's what I concentrate on, and, from that point, he's going to have to take it on his own."
Despite soul-shaking changes in his professional and personal life, Smith is confident that his head, and ego, are in good shape. "The reason I've got a really good grasp on this is because I went through music first, where the ups and downs are more drastic," he says. "In film and TV, there's a natural, gradual decline to your career. In the music business, it's literally one day. The day your record hits the radio, you explode to number one on the countdown. You're the man, you're large, you're doing show after show. Then you're over just that fast. I had the ups of people telling me, 'You're the man, Will.' then the downs of selling your house because you can't afford all this stuff you bought because everybody told you were the man. The money disappeared. But, my God, I learned about myself because I had the ups and all the downs."
The ups included cutting a record at age 17, playing London, Japan and Moscow, becoming a millionaire by age 18, buying luxury cars and buckets of jewelry. As for some of the other downs, he recalls, "I've been in really ugly situations, hostage situations, on the road with my music. You know, you get out to Albany, Georgia and the promoter didn't make his money, so he doesn't want to pay you. I mean, during the first part of my music career, we signed our first deal with a gangster who later tried to shoot us. He was a penny-ante gangster, but the bullets were for real. As we were driving away, he shot at the car five or six times. It was pretty scary, but you don't think about that while it's happening, you're just trying to get away. He would have killed us if he could actually shoot."
No one tried shooting at Smith during his "Fresh Prince" days, but, from what I've heard, some creative people around him might have fantasized it. "I work hard, so I want everyone around me to work hard," he says when I bring up his reputation for being tough on people. "If you're not willing to work hard, let someone else do it. It's not really about being tough on writers or directors or anyone else. I'm really tough on lazy people, people who aren't willing to work. I'd rather be with someone who does a horrible job but gives 110 percent than with someone that does a good job and gives 60 percent."
So far, we've been pretty blasé about how Smith got to be a television and movie star from a record career. Hollywood's a boneyard littered with music stars who couldn't work their mojo on any screen, small or big. Mow exactly does he think he did it? Why, for instance, did Independence Day blast his career into orbit when industry wisdom had it that the far more experienced Bill Pullman would go mondo? He postulates, "I loved Bill Pullman's performance, but I got the great lines and situations. Maybe a lot of it has to do with television training, though. Watch Jim Carrey, Tom Hanks, Robin Williams or Eddie Murphy, who all come from comedy television where you learn to maximize every one hundredth of a second. These guys know that when you do a half hour of television, probably nine minutes of it arc yours and that's it.
"From the first season of "Fresh Prince' on, I got [hold of] every TV show and every movie [those four stars] made, and I watched them over and over to see the differences between the two mediums. I saw that-- outside of Jim Carrey--everything in movies is just a touch smaller, a touch slower, because the camera does more of the work in a film. I sat down, and still do, with an incredible management team to discuss the theory of a TV star versus a movie star, the concept of celebrity versus stardom versus a real actor. I knew I was going 10 want to make the transition 10 movies, so I started off really small--just to get the feel of a movie set and the film world-- Where the Day Takes You.
"Now, I want to be in that place that Robin Williams is--say, where they'll offer him roles that are similar to Mork from Ork, but they'all also offer him Mrs. Doubtfire and Awakenings. Right now, I'm watching a lot of Nicolas Cage, because he's in that place, too. He can do Raising Arizona and Leaving Las Vegas. I'm also studying everything Cary Grant ever did. I want to position myself in a place where people will offer me anything."
Anything? I ask him what we have yet to see from him on camera. "I want to play somebody crazy," he says. "What's good about me playing someone crazy is that I want to play him completely lovable, the kind of guy who's nice, fun, makes you laugh, to whom you give the keys to your house. I think there's a killer inside of me. And I think there's a lover inside of me, and a superhero, and a broken man."
This list prompts an inevitable question: docs Smith consider himself a good actor? "I'm above average in talent, but where I think I excel is psychotic drive," he says, "All I need is for somebody to say I can't do something and this crazy switch inside me makes me attack whatever I'm doing. Psychotic drive is where i excel over people that are probably more naturally gifted."
Psychotic or otherwise, Smith's drive has him in the catbird seat. How is the view from there with regard to his next may be-monster smash, Men in Black? "I haven't seen it assembled," he tells me, "but I think it's going to be great. In fact, make my quote. 'It's the best movie ever made!' Until you see it done, you never gel a sense of the whole movie, especially in science fiction, where they're going to add a lot of effects. But I think Rick Bilker has designed some of the most beautiful and disgusting alien creatures you'll ever see."
Another summer alien flick? Does Smith worry it will be compared to this past summer's big alien flick? "It's scary," he confesses. "I'm thinking that after every movie I do, it'll be: 'It's good, but it's no Independence Day.' I'm taking things one movie, one album, one project at a time. What people are seeing in me is potential. Potential has to be harnessed, then realized. Independence Day was a great step. I'm hoping Men In Black will be another huge leap."
Huge leaps have been Smith's stock-in-trade for some time now. He reflects, "I have been going up for the past 10 years. I haven't really had any valleys in my career, I'm just on a constant incline. I'm sure I've got a down coming eventually. I just hope it's no time soon."
Smith admits that another Independence Day has been "kicked around, but I don't know if that's something Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich are considering." He sounds equally iffy about the prospects of reteaming with Martin Lawrence for a sequel to Bad Boys. "I'm developing a romantic comedy," he reveals. "Miss Jada and I would have a ball on camera, but we don't want to mix business with pleasure right now.
"As for my life right now," he concludes, "the picture I always see in my mind is of that incredible game Michael Jordan had where he had 63 points. He just turned to the TV cameras and shrugged, like, 'Hey, I'm just throwing 'em up there and they're going in." That's how I feel. I'd love to say that I'm brilliant, that I'm the second coming. The real answer is that I'm blessed. I throw 'em up from wherever I am and they just keep going in." He lets out a triumphant laugh, adding, "How cool is that?"
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Stephen Rebello interviewed Teri Hatcher for the October issue of Movieline.