How Fresh Can He Get?

It’s a typically balmy Southern California day, but try figuring that out inside a nominally air-conditioned trailer amid the maze of industrial warehouses on the sweltering Sony lot. Outside in the heat, a few gray-skinned life forms with oversized latex skulls (looking approximately as distended and distressing as a normal, human-sized skull might feel during a bad hangover) slip themselves gingerly into the back of a golf cart and are motored off into the distance.

“I’d love to be on a golf course right now,” says Will Smith with a sigh, who has only a book of golf anecdotes on a nearby coffee table to assuage that particular itch. Instead, Smith is awaiting a call to the set of the science-fiction action comedy “Men in Black” that may or may not come, resigning himself to watching a TV featuring Maury Povich’s nattering head interviewing a guy so stupid he attempted to rob a shop wearing a bag on his head, only he forgot to cut eyeholes into it--the store’s video camera shows him bumping into a display and falling down. The studio audience enthusiastically applauds the aspiring criminal’s idiocy.

Smith laughs heartily, something he does a lot. Even under these dire conditions--of the six hours he’s been sitting around today, he figures, he’s worked 40 minutes, during which nothing actually got shot--Smith’s laugh comes easily. The star and ersatz namesake of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”--the NBC situation comedy that calls it quits May 27 after six seasons (the cast and crew celebrated by engaging NBC head Warren Littlefield, in expensive network-honcho garb, in a food fight)--has a talent for making everyone around him feel welcome. At the conclusion of one season, he even invited the cast of the series to join him on vacation.

“There’s 50 aliens in this shot, and everything has to line up properly, and there’s guys walking on the ceiling, and guys levitating, all this stuff in one shot--and dialogue,” Smith explains patiently. “So it’s like shooting and shooting and shooting. It may take us two days to get 15 seconds of what’s going to be in the movie.

“It’s difficult, because I’m energetic,” he says, somewhat redundantly. “What’s good with the television show is that it moves. You’re always doing something. Sometimes it moves too fast, which creatively can be as difficult. You can’t perfect the moment. But this film moves waaay slow. You might shoot 30 seconds a day, and on a good day, a minute. Two and three hours between when you shoot. It’s tough to keep the energy up.”

It may not be wise to be wasting Smith’s time. Last year’s “Bad Boys,” coming after the critical acclaim for his performance in “Six Degrees of Separation,” confirmed how much his star power could radiate from the multiplex screen; now, the summer behemoth known as “Independence Day” is looming on the horizon. That science-fiction epic, in which aliens ignore most established rules of good neighborly conduct and flat-out pulverize our planet (as Smith explains, “We don’t save the world, we save what’s left of the world”), is roundly expected to be one of the season’s blockbusters, if not the year’s biggest smash, period.

“I’m a huge science-fiction fan, I’ve always loved the genre,” Smith says. “Growing up, I started early with ‘The X-Men’ and ‘Ultraman.’ ‘Ultraman’ was hard-core, but you could see the zippers on the backs of the guys’ costumes.”

Still, back-to-back science-fiction movies for a guy known predominantly for comedy is the sort of career decision that generally provokes agents into pulling out 15% of their hair. Smith explains the choice by evoking the ultimate intangible: “Men in Black’s” executive producer, Steven Spielberg.

“I said, ‘I just did an alien movie’; he said, ‘Nah, this one’s different,’ ” Smith says, momentarily letting the irony of Spielberg’s apparent dismissal of Smith’s upcoming mega-hit linger in the room (in “Independence Day,” Smith’s character blurts, “I can’t wait to kick E.T.’s ass”). “Are you going to tell Steven Spielberg no?”

Claiming to be one who doesn’t pay much attention to box-office hype, Smith nonetheless allows that “ID4,” as it’s referred to in its advertising, is certainly an event. “What’s great about it is it’s an ensemble cast,” he says. “There’s so many great actors in this film, so many little, intricate stories going on, you’re gonna like something. The cast was so well chosen.

“There’s never one scene with all the members of the cast, but we got one scene with about 80%,” he continues. “I just looked around and it was myself, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Robert Loggia, Judd Hirsch, Adam Baldwin--a bunch of us, I was looking around, thinking, ‘Man, this is hard-core,’ being in the same room with this much talent. It’s like being in the game with Michael Jordan--you automatically bring your own game up to the next level. That’s how it felt. I wanted to be worthy of being in that scene.”

At other times, Smith simply was giddy. At one point, he and co-star Goldblum were shooting climactic scenes in which they basically save the planet. Gravely serious stuff to the layman, perhaps, involving a lot of chest-puffing and looking heroic; these two, on the other hand, got off on an epic laughing jag.

“It was just one of those bizarre nights, it was about midnight, we had been there all day and now we’re expected to save the world,” Smith remembers, laughing all over again. “It was really bizarre, because everything was hilarious. The seriousness of saving the world became hilarious. It got to be so funny. We’re looking at each other and cracking up, like, ‘Who the hell would pick you to save the world? You were the Fly, for God’s sake!’ ”

Roland Emmerich, “ID4’s” German-born director and co-writer, says he had sought Smith before his star-making turn in “Bad Boys.” “He’s simply not some blond, American, blue-eyed Marine pilot--what a cliche. He’s much more interesting a performer.”

Dean Devlin, the movie’s producer and co-writer, adds, “He’s really an all-American guy; he stands for all that’s good. He’s like that in real-life, too. He had success at an early age and yet he didn’t become an egomaniac; he’s the sweetest, most real guy you could meet. We needed those qualities for this role.” (Actually, Smith learned the dangers of attitude at an early age, when his music career made him a millionaire at 18 and his spending sprees made strapped him financially by 19.)

Benny Medina, co-executive producer and creator of “Fresh Prince,” says he envisioned this moment of Smith’s impending movie stardom before so much as an episode of the sitcom was shot.

“Movies were something he said he wanted to do the first time we talked to him,” Medina recalls. “Within the next couple of days, he had to do an audition and he picked up this lousy script and read life into lines he had never seen before in front of the network brass and everyone. Afterward, I realized I had just sat through one of those moments that people always talk about having. Once he was in front of the camera, he still had the ability to completely capture your attention and really hold it.”

Smith, 27, has his own theory as to his crossover success on the big screen. “What the TV show taught me was to maximize”--he emphasizes his next words by dragging them out--”every . . . single . . . moment. That’s why TV actors pop on film screens, especially TV comics. Tom Hanks, Jim Carrey, Robin Williams. What happens is, from doing TV comedy, you work so hard to maximize every single individual second, then when you get to doing a movie, you have all the time you need. ‘What--you mean I can try 15 or 20 different options?’ You gotta love that! The energy seems to come through from that training.”

He is, however, a little cavalier in discussing the emotions he felt wrapping the series, couching the sentiment in a joke: “We had the party afterward and everything was cool, and probably about an hour into the party was when people starting realizing, this was it, after the screwdrivers started kicking in.”

Medina reports that such finality had a stronger influence on the young actor. “He was dazed in a way,” Medina says. “He had this kind of a look I’ve seen when something deep is going on, but he doesn’t want to let on what’s going on for fear it’ll cause someone else to become emotional. I was probably the first person to see him after he did his last scene for the series. He walks through the empty house, then leaves, and I saw him come off the set and his eyes were full of tears.”

Nonetheless, Smith is able to present a clear-eyed post-mortem on the series. “Our third season was creatively the most difficult season, but the best work was done then, this last being a close second,” he says. “The third season, the ratings just exploded. That was at the peak of the audience being into the ‘Fresh Prince,’ and that was when for a second it stopped being fun and started being a job. It was, ‘Oh, man, there’s syndication, and if we can just make this last. . . .’ It started being about, ‘We have to make great shows.’ Rather than just having fun and great shows came out of that.”

His weakest season, he says, was the fourth. “I did ‘Six Degrees’ between our third and fourth season, and I grew tremendously as an actor but at that time I didn’t realize how far you could get lost in a character, and I got so far into the Paul character that when I came back for the fourth season, I was lost, I didn’t know what I was doing,” he says. “I didn’t know who my character was, I didn’t know how to talk or how to stand or any of that stuff. I lost the character. Before the fifth season, I did ‘Bad Boys’ with Martin Lawrence, and working with Martin, I found the fun and the comedy and all of that again.”

The series leaves the air at the perfect time, Smith says; any longer and the show would have to be renamed “The Stale Prince of Bel-Air.”

Likewise, don’t look for him to pursue his music career any time soon, as the current pop culture climate has rendered his and partner Jazzy Jeff’s brand of wholesome rap as irrelevant as the Pauly Shore fan club newsletter.

“Right now, rap has changed so drastically, it’s very different from when I started,” he says. “Somewhere along the line, it became hip to be ignorant. I don’t understand that, I don’t understand how people can think it’s cool not to be articulate. Somewhere along the line, it got cool to be a killer? How can that be cool? That’s the most ridiculous nonsense that I’ve ever experienced in my life.

“Now, any ignorant a------ can get a record contract. And people like it,” he says, and his laugh turns incredulous.

“Six Degrees” was a turning point in his career, though he cops to the one shot he took for that performance: His character was gay so he shouldn’t have balked at kissing a man on-screen. “It was definitely a bit of a cheat,” Smith acknowledges. “That was a difficult time in my life. I just talked to Laurence Fishburne about that. He said, ‘Now if you’re gonna be an actor, you gotta go. Go all the way, or don’t go.’ I was like, ‘Damn!’ I knew it, but I had just had my son and I thought all my son’s friends are gonna be watching it, there were so many things going on. But I’m an actor and if I’m going to be an actor, I’ve got to do what the role calls for. I have to commit.”

Smith says he still wants to continue to take roles as challenging as the one in “Six Degrees” but admits, “The studios keep offering the big paychecks to do the ‘Bad Boys,’ the ‘Badder Boys’ and the big blockbusters. But you have to dig inside yourself or you play yourself out.”

Indeed, in two months, when “Men in Black” wraps, Smith will segue into the “Bad Boys” sequel in Miami (“best golf in the world,” he says). There’s no script yet; in fact, he’s not even sure who’s writing it. No matter, he says: The last one was a mess when he and Lawrence walked on the set (How much of a mess? It had been written with Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz in mind), and they improvised their way to box-office bliss. No reason, Smith reasons, that magic can’t happen again.

“With those action movies, the thing you have to get right is your bad guy--your movie’s only as good as your bad guy,” he says. “You get your bad guy right and you get your explosions right, Martin and I will take care of the rest.”