by Gill Pringle in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
Reflecting back on a career spanning four decades, he talked about how, as a boy, he dreamed of being a scientist because he loved figuring out puzzles and problems. “I love problems… so, yeah, then I started making my own problems,” he quipped reflecting on difficult recent times.
“You know [I thought] life is going too fine. Let’s have some problems!”
At 55 years old, he remains one of Hollywood’s most bankable movie stars, with an Oscar, a BAFTA and four Grammys on his mantlepiece.
If it seems like Smith has always been a movie star – then, in the early days of his career, he turned to an unlikely source of advice: Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“He was the first person to really explain it to me,” he recalls. “I knew that traveling was important. I knew that going to other countries and seeing people was important. So, I told Arnold: ‘I want to do what you’re doing. What advice would you give me if I want to be the biggest movie star in the world?’”
At this point, Smith pulls off a spot-on impersonation of Schwarzenegger’s voice: “‘If you want to be the biggest movie star in the world, your movies can not only be popular in America. You have to go to every country in the world. You have to meet the people; you have to see the people. If your film is only successful in America, you are not a movie star.’”
Heeding the Austrian bodybuilder’s wisdom, he followed in his footsteps.
Despite all the trappings of movie stardom, Smith would have us know that it’s not without its pain.
“As an actor, you’re kind of bending your mind a little bit to play these characters, and it can be dangerous. You bend your mind a little bit and it never totally goes away. Characters can register in your mind as actual experiences. It stays in your psyche as an actual experience, and you have to be really careful – you can have nightmares.
“You can have all kinds of things that happen if you go too deeply into a character, and I’ve done that once or twice in my life where I’ve gone too far. And it can twist you up a little bit,” says the actor, referring specifically to The Pursuit of Happyness in 2006 in which he played real life homeless father Chris Gardner.
“Chris was there with me, and walked me through the streets where he had slept with his son, and took me to the bathroom that he had spent the night in with his son. And he said: ‘I want you to just have some time in there by yourself.’ And I stood in that dirty subway bathroom, and just burst into tears. And then ultimately when we shot the scene – and I was doing it with my actual son laying on my lap in the bathroom and it was really tough and I grew as an actor from that,” he says.
Six years prior to that film, Smith received his first best actor Oscar nod for his portrayal of legendary boxer Muhammad Ali in biopic Ali.
“I didn’t realise that when you make a movie about someone who’s alive – one day, you’re going to be sitting in a movie theater and they’re going to watch it for the first time. And I remember sitting behind Muhammad Ali, while he’s watching, and I’m sitting there and the movie starts. And I was like, ‘Oh no, this was really dumb.’ And I’m terrified sitting there behind Ali while he’s watching the movie. Midway through the movie, he’s not giving me anything. He’s not looking back. I’m like, ‘Well, you know I’m back here.’ So, he’s watching the movie, and he looks over at his wife midway through, and says: ‘Was I that crazy?’ And she said ‘yes’. And then he looked back and he said: ‘You almost pretty enough to play me,’” Smith laughs.
By the time he played Richard Williams – the father of Serena and Venus Williams – for biopic King Richard, he knew better. “When you make a movie about someone who’s alive, you totally lose any concern other than the family has to love it. You’re like: ‘If the person you portray, doesn’t like it, it’s like a year of your life that you’ve given – and they hate it.’ So, I’ve been blessed that all of the subjects of my true stories have appreciated my depictions,” he says, not withstanding that his Oscar win for the film would be so overshadowed by his slapping presenter Chris Rock over a perceived slight to his wife Jada Pinkett Smith.
With Smith’s upbeat personality and genuine warmth and charisma, few movie stars seem better equipped to deal with the slings and bows of celebrity.
In reality, he’s not so sure.
“Fame is a unique monster, and I’ve had to be really careful,” he muses. “You can’t get excited when everybody is saying good things about you. Because the more you take, when people are saying good things about you, the more hurt you’re going to be when people are saying bad things about you.
“And what I’ve experienced in my adversities of the last couple of years is: I have to be clear about who I am and what I am attempting to do in the world. And I can’t need others to applaud for me to stay focused on my mission.
“I have always wanted to put good into the world and make people smile. I’ve always been devoted to the process of joy and inspiration, and I want you to feel good, right? And at the same time, I am deeply human, and my virtue is not yet perfected. And I am in the process of perfecting my virtue. So, I would say the greatest thing that has happened is I have been deeply humbled and deeply inspired to perfect my light and that’s what this next phase of my life is going to be – perfecting and shining my light as brightly as I can on as many people as I can,” he told an intimate gathering at a public cinema in suburban Jeddah.
If Smith’s box office currency threatened to take a ding after the events of the 2022 Oscars, then 2024 is already predicted to return him to blockbuster supremacy.
Not only with the upcoming release of his fourth Bad Boys buddy cop action comedy co-starring Martin Lawrence – but with a highly anticipated sequel to his 2007 sci-fi hit, I Am Legend. Throughout the past decade there have been rumours of a sequel, largely dismissed because Smith’s Robert Neville character died at the end.
Revealing how he would be talking with Michael B Jordan over the weekend, Smith teased, “You have to be a real I Am Legend buff – but in the theatrical version, my character dies. And everybody’s like, ‘Well wait a minute.. how you gonna make a part 2?’ But on the DVD, there was an alternate version of the ending of the movie where my character lives. So, we’re going with the mythology of the DVD version where my character lives. And I can’t tell you any more other than we have a script and Michael B Jordan is in it.”
It’s not surprising that Smith believes he’s learned a few things about the elusive nature of a box office hit over the course of his astonishingly flop-free career.
“I’m a studier, so the important thing for me in life is that I continually learn. I am an amateur religious history buff, so I’ve studied the stories that last for thousands of years. And at the core of those stories is human suffering – and a character who is suffering and sets out in the world to achieve the thing that he or she believes will end their suffering. So, that is really basic and simple.”
Furthermore, he tells his creative partners to think of each film in just a few broad strokes. “One, somebody wants something badly and they go for it against all odds, or somebody falls in a hole, and they spend the movie trying to get out. And at the end of the movie, they get out of the hole and that’s a happy ending. Or they end in the hole and that’s a tragedy. Right?
“So, I would say, yes, I have good instincts, but it’s more because I think scientifically about what is the point of this movie?
“And I think most movies are about people trying to figure out how to be here without being miserable, and how to be okay with life; how to not just survive. It’s how to thrive in this collective potential existential tragedy that we’ve all been dropped into. How do we make joy and love out of that?” he asks.
Now if he had all the answers, wouldn’t that be something?
