The Mr. Showbiz Will Smith interview...

Remember that guy in high school? The one who was voted most popular, had the prettiest girlfriend, and threw the best parties--all, it seemed, without effort? Well, that guy grew up and became Will Smith.

But first he became the Fresh Prince. While still in his teens, Smith and a buddy from Philadelphia teamed up to become MTV stars and Grammy winners as the bubblegum-rap duo DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince ("Parents Just Don't Understand"). His irrepressible charisma won Smith a spot in the fortunately named sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which ran for six years. While still working on the show, Smith reclaimed his real name and busted out of the small box, winning a dramatic big-screen role--as a con artist who charms his way into a wealthy couple's home in Six Degrees of Separation. Surprise--the guy could act, too.

After several years of big-screen work, the erstwhile Prince has ascended to a more regal position in Hollywood: King of the Fourth of July Blockbuster. Now twenty-eight, Smith is currently starring opposite Tommy Lee Jones in the sci-fi comedy Men in Black, playing a wisecracking federal agent who

The hero's role may not seem natural for a guy who jokes that he should play the lead in a live-action version of Dumbo, but his quick wit has given him his own niche among action stars. It comes as little surprise that he names Eddie Murphy as a major career influence, and even less that he performs an expert impersonation of the actor-comedian. Funny, energetic, and attentive during a recent interview in Beverly Hills, Smith made the secret of his success very clear. You can envy his success--and his stunning girlfriend, actress Jada Pinkett--all you want, but he's impossible not to like.

So, are you going to save the world every Independence Day?

I'm going to take next year off. I'll let Wesley [Snipes] save the world. Let Tom Cruise save the world next year. Let me take a rest. But that's my weekend--July 4th. I own that.

Where will you be when Men in Black opens?

I'm going away somewhere. I hate those opening weekends. I try not to pay attention to the box office. Just do the work. Enjoy it if it's a good movie, and you're happy with your work. Let that be enough. Not to have to earn $100 million in seventeen minutes. It's too much pressure, and it is really out of your control.

Have you gotten used to special effects yet?

I'm an expert now, but special-effects work is so tedious. It's difficult to get a performance because it's so technical. You have to get your head a certain way, then your arm has to be up a certain way when you're talking to the alien. It's like, aargh! And it's one line at a time. You gotta pay so much attention to saying it at the right tempo, and at the right time, that you can't really concentrate on being normal.

Does acting in a special-effect-driven scene make you lose some of the spontaneity that you're known for?

It's so terribly difficult. I've been lucky. I think a lot of it is the television training. You've got five days, period. What you have on Friday is what's going on the air, period. You get in the habit of doing things, creating things, quickly. You got your friends on the side--"Give me a line, Give me a line, Give me a line." You get into that tempo. Then when you get into a movie, especially a special-effects movie, the tempo is so much slower, but your mind is still going a million miles a minute. So you end up pitching more, and getting more things done, and it's so much easier to find that great line, or that great delivery, in that form. So you get more time, and there's a lot more space to achieve that perfection.

You've saved the world from alien invasion two summers in a row. How do you make your characters in Independence Day and Men in Black different from one another?

I felt comfortable with that because you change everything for the character. There are subtle differences with the Marine [in Independence Day], you know. In Independence Day, you have the shoulders back, you're standing up. The whole posture, and the walk, and the attitude, and all of that stuff is completely different. Whereas with the Men in Black character, how he sits in a chair, and the whole attitude, is that New York cop kind of thing. The central similarities that I like to bring to characters is the fun. You're going to see similarities in those types of characters who save the world, but this movie is drastically different.

Isn't part of it that people just like Will Smith?

I like to have fun. I like to be silly, make jokes, and people enjoy that. People generally have fun in my life. So when the camera's turned on I'm having fun, and I think people can see that, people can feel that when they watch the movie.

Did you have fun working with Tommy Lee Jones? He doesn't have a reputation for being a very "fun" person.

It's really weird. We had a ball on the set of this movie. Tommy Lee Jones is silly, you know. He's making jokes . . . we're on the set, and [director] Barry Sonnenfeld claims to be the best shoe kicker in the world, right? Thinks he can put his shoe on the toe of his foot and kick it accurately anywhere within thirty yards. So he sets up a trash can, and he's kickin' and kickin', for an hour he doesn't come within twenty yards of this trash can. Tommy Lee walks on the set, never opens his mouth. He looks, he sees Barry kickin' at the trash can. He takes his shoe off, puts it on his toe, and he kicks it thirty yards directly into the center of the trash can. He says, "Mornin', y'all, somebody want to go grab that shoe for me, please?" At the same time, he was completely straight, completely deadpan. But that's just how his comedy is. People look at the characters Tommy plays as not having a sense of humor, but it's actually the opposite. You have to have a brilliant comedic mind to be able to do that type of straight, nothing, deadpan delivery and make it hilarious. He's a technical comedian; he has a brilliant technical understanding of comedy in a scene. We called it "soft pitching." And with that dead-straight delivery, he would toss me soft pitches, that I could smack out of the ballpark. Just lobbin' those jokes up there for me.

Your movie career is going great now, of course, but how sad were you to see The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air end?

The thing about that show is that it's a family. We had a ball. The people start to take on the surrogate roles of the characters, you start to have those kind of concerns for the people that you work with. It's like leaving a family, more than just leaving a job. But creatively I was starting to feel stagnant; there wasn't anywhere to go. I had done a couple of movies during the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. I had seen how vast the film world could be. You can do anything on a big screen, there's so much more room. That was more exciting.

And I talked to Sherman Hemsley--George Jefferson--and he said the way that they found out that The Jeffersons was over is they came to the set one Monday, and their parking spaces were gone. You know, I don't want to go out that way. They never had a final episode. You need to close that chapter in your life. I wanted to plan the going out. You know, go out standing, rather than go out on your back.

You once talked about the importance of playing a black hero. But how important is your success as a black actor?

That's hugely important to me. Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer marketed Bad Boys like Flashdance or Top Gun--as a big, mainstream movie, just like all of their other movies. What that did is, the Hollywood perception was "Oh, okay, they're not black, they're huge." They built that perception. Also, [director] Fred Schepisi with Six Degrees of Separation, giving me the shot with that movie. Six Degrees and Bad Boys were the two films that really set me up to be in a position to be offered all different types of movies in Hollywood.

You've seen how Eddie Murphy's movie career has gone up and down, and back up again. Are you concerned that that could happen to you?

It's tough like that. Hollywood's a tough town. I look at it like, you're driving on the highway and it's raining, and there's that one car broken down on the side of the road. Hundreds of thousands of cars in perfect working order in every direction, and there's that one car broken down on the side of the road. One day, that's gonna be you. One day, you're going to be that car broken down on the side of the road. And when you are, it's cool, it's okay. Tow truck's gonna come. You're gonna get it fixed, you're gonna be back on the road. You just gotta ride through it.

What keeps you grounded, so you don't get a big head?

I was in the music business first, and it's really cutthroat and hard. So I had my ups and downs. Had money, then was broke. I kinda got my footing together before I got into television and the film world. Because this type of attention can make you crazy.

Men in Black director Barry Sonnenfeld said that white audiences don't find you threatening. Do you think that's part of your--

[Bellows.] I don't know, man! [Laughs.] The bottom line with me is fun. I don't like stress. People have so much stress in their lives that it's kind of a breath of fresh air to just sit for an hour and a half and watch a movie of somebody who's just having fun. I enjoy life, I enjoy people. And people--black, white, Asian . . . or alien--enjoy that energy.

What does your girlfriend, actress Jada Pinkett, bring to that energy?

She's reality. Jada is completely real; she's uncomfortable with the press and the attention. She really keeps me in a grounded place: that life is really the most important thing, and how a big movie, and all of that, is fun. You can enjoy that, and Hollywood premieres, but your life and your family is what's really important.

You have mentioned Eddie Murphy as a role model. What has he given you as a film actor, and as a person?

Eddie is the only person that I ever imitated. It's like, with my friends, Eddie inspired a generation of black comedians, in the same way that Richard Pryor inspired the generation after him. In our lives, we have things that we say that are Eddie Murphy lines from movies. There's probably fifteen or twenty of them that my friends and I say that are just a part of our lives. Like if somebody steps on your foot, or something like that, and they didn't realize they did it, we say, [imitating Murphy] "Taste the soup. Taste the soup." That's from the end of Coming to America. We've created a dialogue that Eddie Murphy supplies. He's the person that made me see that, okay, maybe I can do this. Because I had never even thought about acting, but seeing Eddie, and being able to be in the mirror delivering Eddie Murphy lines the way that he delivers them, made me feel that I could do it.

Now that you've signed a new record deal with Columbia (which also produced Men in Black), that company pretty much owns you now.

Yeah, I know [laughs], one big happy family.

You have shattered so many barriers in your career. People say you're not supposed to go from music into film, but you did it; not supposed to go from TV into film, you did it; not supposed to go from drama to comedy, you did it. You're also shattering a race barrier. Do you see any limits for yourself?

I want to do everything. I want to be the first black President. Give me about ten years, I'm going to run for President. If I can squeeze in an N.B.A. championship before that, I'll do it.

Are there any sequels due for either Independence Day or Men in Black?

There are no scripts for either one of them, but I'm very interested. If they come up with a great script, I'm there.

Courtesy of Mr. Showbiz.

Coming soon... Will Smith in Empire.