The Prince Who Would Be King

The thing to understand about Will Smith is this: The man couldn’t get down and funky if he tried. He knows this about himself. He’s OK with it.

“My music is really polished, really clean,” he says, sitting at his breakfast table. “But while I’m making it I feel like: ‘This is grungy. I’m coming with the funk!’ [Here his head starts bobbing to imaginary grooves.] Then when I listen to it against the sound that I thought I was making--like J.Z. or Puffy or Biggy--then it’s like, ‘You know, my music sounds . . . different.’ ”

The other thing to understand about Will Smith is that, believe it or not, he’s just handed you the key to his being. Not just the funk-deficit part (which you already knew about if you’ve been paying attention). It’s also the cheerful way he cops to it. You’ve got to love a guy with that much straight-ahead guileless charm. No airs. He’s just Will.

But look more closely. See the art of it? It’s the way he can laugh at himself, come on as self-effacing and down-to-earth as Clark Kent, when all the while he expects you to see that he’s really Superman.

Think about it: The guy is a rap star--same job title as Ice Cube, Ice-T, Ice Pick . . . whatever rhyming street tough scowls from the cover of Vibe this month. An air of menace is currency in that gig, generally speaking. But Smith has never menaced anybody--his first name is Willard, after all. He’s sitting here in his dining room this hazy morn, not an hour’s drive from where the Notorious B.I.G. got capped, and he’s flying into the face of rap convention wearing a screwy Alfred E. Neuman smile.

Yeah, he’s just Will. But implicit in the way he can goof on himself for not making the funkster grade is his offhand assumption that he doesn’t have to. He’s Will. And ordinary rules don’t apply.

*

Before breakfast, Smith has spent some time in his studio behind the garage of his hacienda-style home, listening to some tracks he’d laid down, letting the music seep under his skin before he completes the songs. They’re for some future album, but this isn’t his priority right now.

He’s in the midst of filming “Wild, Wild West,” the movie adaptation of the old television series, with Smith, 30, starring in the role originated by Robert Conrad. And he’s promoting “Enemy of the State,” an action thriller co-starring Gene Hackman set to be released Nov. 20. Both films are risky ventures for Smith. Though he’s surrounded by heavyweight acting talent, he clearly is out front in a way he has not been before, and in “Enemy” he plays a more mature character than his audience is used to seeing him play.

From the day he first gained widespread public notice as a young rapper from Philadelphia, the Will Smith persona has remained pretty consistent. With his first major rap hit with DJ Jazzy Jeff, the playful “Parents Just Don’t Understand” in 1988, he did more than anyone to make rap music safe for suburbia. His being cool rather than funky was a plus--no one could find it threatening.

On NBC’s “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” he even poked fun at himself in the mini-video that opened every episode. On the show he was like Bugs Bunny--an affable smarty-pants who never lost his cool while driving everybody else (Elmer Fudds, all) absolutely daffy. No one could beat him. At anything. And he made it all look so easy.

Smith beefed up and did grown-up things like shoot guns and fly jets in his subsequent movie roles, but at heart he was still the Fresh Prince.

Director Tony Scott was worried initially about how the audience would react to Smith in a suit, tie and suspenders in “Enemy” and whether fans were ready to see him in a film that--for all its action and humor--nevertheless has serious overtones. Tom Cruise had been considered for the role early on.

“It was a concern,” Scott says, “that the audience might just want to see Will Smith in ‘Men in Black.’ ”

Scott fretted about it right up until the film was tested in Phoenix, and he saw that audiences had no trouble accepting him. “It was the best screening Jerry [Bruckheimer] and I have ever had,” says Scott, who has worked with the producer four times previously. “Not one of the crowd commented on that. It surprised me.”

Not Smith.

Like the characters he plays, he has overwhelming faith that he can do whatever he sets his mind to.

How confident is he?

Barry Sonnenfeld, who directed him in “Men in Black,” says that when he finishes “Wild, Wild West” next June he will go directly into pre-production for a film about the life of Muhammad Ali, in which Smith will star. Smith plans to play the boxer from a young man to his ill and bloated later years. “I want to do the ‘Raging Bull’ thing and gain 30 pounds,” he says.

This is the sort of role a seasoned actor attempts when he’s going after an Oscar. No one expects it from an easygoing rap-star-turned-TV-comedian-turned-matinee-idol. Which is a big reason why Smith is doing it.

“With every film you take on, people need to be saying, ‘He can’t do that,’ ” he says, explaining how he and manager Steve Lassiter choose roles. “You need to take that kind of leap. People need to think it was a bad choice.”

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Although Smith didn’t know about it until later, certain studio executives thought he was a bad choice to co-star with Tommy Lee Jones in “Men in Black.”

“The person everyone from [executive producer] Steven Spielberg to the studio wanted to play his part was Chris O’Donnell,” says Sonnenfeld. “My wife was the only one who read the script who said, ‘Hire Will.’ . . . When Chris passed on the project--and I think I helped him pass because I wanted Will--then the talk was about Keanu Reeves,” he says. “Now, it’s hard to imagine anyone but Will in that role, and especially not Chris O’Donnell or Keanu Reeves.”

“Men in Black,” the top summer hit of 1997, grossed $572 million worldwide. Coming after the financial successes of Smith’s previous films, “Bad Boys” and “Independence Day,” the top-grossing movie of 1996, the science-fiction comedy catapulted him to the top of the A-list.

An internal MTV research document about the moviegoing habits of young people indicates just how popular Smith is. In the survey, conducted in late May, 600 filmgoers between the ages of 12 and 34 were asked which movie actor excited them most. Smith ranked No. 1 with 77% of those polled choosing him--that’s higher than Brad Pitt, higher than Tom Cruise, higher than Jim Carrey, even higher than Leonardo DiCaprio.

Smith now can choose whatever role he wants. And what he chooses to do is follow the advice of his mother, a school board employee from Philadelphia.

“Eclecticism is a virtue,” was always one of her favorite sayings. “I don’t think I’ll ever do any one genre exclusively,” Smith says. “I’m going to try to mix it up.

“In watching Tom Cruise, Eddie Murphy, Tom Hanks, Robin Williams and Jim Carrey, it’s the choice of films in the order in which they choose them that I think makes all the difference in the world,” he says. “From ‘Philadelphia’ to ‘Forrest Gump’ is a huge leap. This leaves room for failure because people are not comparing your next movie to your last.”

Smith’s career thus far illustrates his philosophy of mixing it up. While still starring in the situation comedy “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” he took the serious part of a bisexual con man in the little-seen “Six Degrees of Separation” in 1993. From that to co-starring with comedian Martin Lawrence in the 1995 action thriller “Bad Boys” was another huge leap.

“One film without the other may not have been as exciting,” he says. “And to go from ‘Bad Boys’ to ‘Enemy’ would have been less huge a leap than from ‘Men in Black’ to ‘Enemy.’ ”

As he sits discussing this, it suddenly dawns just how huge a leap he has in mind for himself. Whatever lens through which you’ve viewed Smith thus far is almost certainly far narrower than the view he has of himself.

Since Sidney Poitier’s peak in the 1960s, when for several years he ranked at or near the top in box-office grosses, no black non-comedic leading man has reached that level of stardom. Denzel Washington comes closest, and he’s seldom headed the cast of a huge hit. Only comedians Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor have consistently done it. If he makes the right choices, Smith could be the next Poitier.

But his sights are set even higher than that. He wants a career without limits, without labels.

“I guess Tom Hanks’ is closest to the career that I want to have,” he says, citing the former TV comedian who went on to become one of Hollywood’s most versatile stars. But even that’s too limiting a role model. “There’s never been an actor that has done what I want to do,” he finally allows.

And what does he want to do? “It would be a combination of Robin Williams, Eddie Murphy and Arnold Schwarzenegger,” he says, laughter dulling the edge of his ambition. “No one has ever been able to successfully cross that range.

“Robin Williams is probably the most brilliant example of someone being able to play both comedy and drama,” he says, “but he can’t run with his shirt off with a gun.”

As for Schwarzenegger, he can and has run around plenty with his shirt off while carrying a gun. “But he couldn’t do ‘Sleepless in Seattle,’ ” Smith says. “I want to be the first person to successfully reach across the entire range of work that Hollywood has to offer.”

The most recent offering is “Enemy of the State,” in which Smith plays a lawyer, husband and father who unwittingly gets caught up in government intrigue. He spends much of the movie desperately running for his life (yes, sometimes without a shirt) from rogue U.S. agents who are willing to kill him to get hold of a videotape that he doesn’t even know he possesses.

The filmmakers draw plot elements from the 1975 espionage thriller “Three Days of the Condor” and especially from “The Conversation,” the emotionally rich and complex Francis Ford Coppola film from 1974 that dealt with issues of guilt and alienation and the difficulty of determining what is true. Hackman starred in that film--as he co-stars in this one--as a surveillance expert who is in trouble.

This being a Bruckheimer production, “Enemy” jettisons the truly weighty stuff, replacing it with explosions, wisecracks, comic bickering, rising tension and plenty of MTV-style quick cutting. Still, an air of seriousness hangs over the film as it taps into the national epidemic of distrust and raises unsettling questions about privacy rights.

As the character Smith plays frantically scampers through Washington trying to save his skin, the vast resources of the National Security Agency are employed to track almost his every move. No scrap of digitalized information is inaccessible to them, and no surveillance camera image can’t instantly be used for their purposes. And nearly every nook and cranny of this Washington, it seems, is under the camera’s eye.

“Tony wanted people to walk out of the theater and look up at the sky, check their pagers, check their cell phones,” says Smith. “He wanted to leave people with that kind of feeling. This is no big message film by any stretch of the imagination, but it is something to think about--here’s a guy who didn’t do anything but try to go get his wife a Christmas present and his life was destroyed.”

But while people rightfully are concerned about protecting privacy, Smith says, “On the other hand it would’ve been nice if they’d been conducting surveillance and picked up the cell phone call from U-Haul before Oklahoma City. . . . What do you do?”

Don Simpson, Bruckheimer’s late partner, came up with the idea for the movie after watching “The Conversation” and “Condor.” “He thought we should make a movie in that vein,” says Bruckheimer.

Hackman’s casting as a wholly different character in “Enemy,” despite some similarities to his role as Harry Caul in “The Conversation,” was not intended as a tip of the hat to the earlier film, Scott says. But in one of several homages to “The Conversation,” which Scott says is one of his favorites, a photograph of Caul is used on an ID card in “Enemies.”

Playing opposite Hackman and Jon Voight, who plays the villain of the piece, kept Smith on his toes. “Those guys don’t miss,” he says. “Every word that comes out of their mouths will give you a chill. They’re like Sammy Sosa to the 10th power--they’re smacking the ball out of the park every time you pitch it to them.”

Sonnenfeld says Smith seeks out powerful actors to work with. A stipulation of his contract for “Wild, Wild West,” says the director, was that an actor of equal or greater stature be hired to play opposite him (Kevin Kline landed the role of Artemes Gordon, Smith’s partner in the film). “He doesn’t want to carry a movie,” Sonnenfeld says.

Smith calls it smart marketing. Carrey, he says, is the only contemporary actor who can be counted on to consistently bring in huge audiences merely on the strength of his name. “The days of people going to see one guy essentially are over,” he says. “You have to have the strength of an ensemble.”

*

Popularity is power for an actor in Hollywood, so it’s legitimate to ask how Smith intends to use his. Why, other than ego, does he want to become undisputed heavyweight champion of the screen? Will he use film to express some personal vision? Sonnenfeld, who describes Smith as a total collaborator in the movies they make together, says the actor could easily direct.

“I will turn to Will and ask for his advice about camera setups, about how a scene is playing out, about the structure of the film--anything about the process of making a movie,” he says. “He’s one of the most intelligent people I know. . . . He could do whatever he wants.”

But Smith, uncharacteristically, has a more modest view of his role in filmmaking. “My music is completely about me, what I think, what I’m feeling--it’s a snapshot of my life at a particular time,” he says, “whereas a film is someone else’s vision, and I’m a tool to help them build the wonderful collage that they have in mind.”

Smith’s conversation is full of references to his upbringing in Philadelphia as one of Caroline and Willard Smith Sr.’s four children, and their oldest son.

His mother pushed him to get a good education. Despite good SAT scores, Smith says his grades weren’t good enough to get him into MIT, where he’d planned to study computer engineering. But his mother got him accepted in a preparatory program for the school. He stunned his parents when he told them he wanted to skip college.

“At that point [1986] nobody had made a career of rapping,” he says.

Smith’s father is a refrigeration engineer, an Air Force veteran and a profound influence on Smith. Much of the actor’s confidence as well as his work ethic comes from him.

“I was sitting and talking with Jerry [Bruckheimer] one day and he said, ‘I’ve finally figured you out. You’re a white-collar professional with a blue-collar mentality,’ ” Smith recalls.

“That really kind of sums it up,” the actor says. “I work on movies the way my father worked on compressors: You work when you have the work, not when you want to work. People that you meet along the way, treat them nicely because you want them to call back. You get your tools in order, make sure your clothes are nice. You say, ‘yes, sir,’ ‘no, sir,’ ‘pleased to meet you, sir.’ Do the best job you can do and don’t leave until it’s done.”

Smith’s can-do attitude also comes from his father. Smith has a mantra that he repeats to psyche himself up: “There’s nobody like you. There’s nobody like you in the whole world, and there never will be anyone like you.” He says the words with feeling.

“The truth is that deep down, I’m probably not as confident as I seem,” he allows in what seems to verge on a moment of self-revelation. “But I’d never admit it to myself,” he quickly adds.

This is one of the reasons he believes he was made to portray the man who titled his autobiography “The Greatest.”

“I was brought up to expect to have the best the world has to offer,” he says, “and also to expect to be the best.

“I feel him. I feel Ali. Besides,” he adds, unable to resist, “I am the Greatest.”

He’s laughing, but he does not seem to be kidding.

He knows playing Ali would be a gamble. “Warren Beatty told me he thought it was a big mistake to do the story of someone’s life when they’re still living,” he says. “I completely agree: It would be a bad move for someone other than Will Smith to make a movie on someone’s life when they’re still alive. There are a lot of pitfalls. The character’s story isn’t finished yet.”

But that rule of thumb doesn’t apply to him, he says: “I guess we all have to feel we’re special.”

One quality he shares with Ali is the ability to carry his huge ego with such sweet-natured comic elan that it never comes across as arrogant, at least not offensively so. By all accounts he is a genuinely nice human being. People who work with him and know him say that in person he is the same as he is on screen--lovable, bright, full of energy, funny.

Smith has a story that may explain how he can manage to seem super-confident and humble at the same time. He remembers going on a job with his father to repair a broken freezer in the basement of a supermarket when he was younger.

“A supermarket basement is the nastiest place in the world,” he says, setting the scene. “You have broken catsup bottles from 30 years ago, you have floors covered with 30 years of gunk. They are really disgusting places. You walk into the basement and you can hear your feet sticking to the floor.”

On this particular job, Smith remembers that when they looked under the freezer to check the compressor, they saw a dead rat lying on the floor. “He moved it to the side with his bare hands,” Smith recalls, “just reached down, picked it up and moved it over. Then, to work on the compressor, he lay on his back and put his head underneath the compressor on the ground where the dead rat had been, and the rat was still there, beside his head. It was nothing to him. . . . There was nothing that my father couldn’t do.

“At that moment I said to myself, ‘That man loves me.’ ” He laughs and shakes his head in admiration and wonder. “To do that to put food on our table, to be that determined to feed his family. . . .

“Everyday that I get to go to work and I don’t have to push rats around I’m thanking God,” he continues. “I’m not one to complain about my trailer or my call time or anything like that. You won’t hear me complaining. When I go to work, I’m excited to be there.”

*

As if on cue, as he talks about his father, Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett, comes into the room with the telephone. It’s Trey, Smith’s 5-year-old son by his first marriage, who has just finished a soccer game. Smith is excited to hear that Trey had just made his first goal. He tells him he’s sorry he couldn’t be there to see it.

Smith and Pinkett, who were married last December, also have a child, Jaden Christopher Syre, born in July. Being a father not only changed the way he lives his life, says Smith--the couple tends to stay home much more now--but it also has changed the way he views his own parents. “The perception we have of our parents when we’re growing up is completely false,” he says, echoing the sentiments of his first big rap hint. “Parents don’t have a clue. They’re just doing the best they can. You feel like they’re completely in control, that they know everything and know what they’re doing. . . . They’re winging it. My father was just like me. That was the biggest surprise about being a parent.”

The Smiths live northwest of Los Angeles in a home full of Southwestern touches and art. (Propped on a bar in their home, prominently displayed, is a framed black-and-white photograph of Ali from 1966. He’s wearing a black jacket with thin lapels, as was the style in those days, and Ray-Ban sunglasses. It is inscribed: “To Will, I was the original man in black.”)

Smith and Pinkett have decided to try not to both work on films at the same time; this way one of them can always stay home with the children. For this reason, “Love for Hire,” a sexy story Smith and Pinkett wrote together, most likely will become a vehicle for Smith and another actress.

The idea of her husband rolling around in bed with another woman doesn’t bother her. “It’s bound to happen,” she says. “I’ve done it. We’re lucky that we’re both actors, so I know what it’s about, and I know it’s not at all like what it looks like.” In fact, she and Smith are in agreement that a good sex scene is what his career needs right now, to show a side of him that has not yet been explored on film.

It’s all part of his strategy to become the champ, to excel at everything.

“I’d love to do a movie with Halle Berry or Whitney Houston,” he says. “Or Julia Roberts or somebody like that, if I want to get real fresh.”

People who have worked with Smith predict that race will be no barrier to what he can do. “I think it comes from personality and talent--not skin color,” says Bruckheimer. “The fact that he’s African American is just a part of who he is; it’s not something to box him up in.”

“He has that strange karmic charisma that some people have and some don’t,” says Sonnenfeld.

“I’ve told him if he runs for president I would donate all my time and effort to help get him elected,” he adds. “I’d make commercials, I’d campaign for him, I’d stuff envelopes, anything.”