"I am a river to my people."
Will Smith says those words at the end of a conversation in which the 46-year-old talks about basketball, his kids, his new film Focus, Hugh Jackman's body fat, chronic dissatisfaction, and, yes, how a river represents his highest aspiration.
Sitting courtside at the Sixers-Grizzlies game on December 13, 2014, at the Wells Fargo Center in Philly.
Scott Raab: Nice seats. You come here often?
Will Smith: I am not paying attention to the game at all this year. I've been in Pittsburgh shooting.
Voices: Will Smith, I love you! Will Smith!
WS: That's hilarious.
SR: Did you play in high school?
WS: No, not at all. I didn't have the basketball gene. My first record came out when I was seventeen.
SR: You turned pro.
WS: I had a ball. Thirty days before I graduated from high school, my record came out. I had a month of having a record on the radio and being a high school student. It doesn't get too much better than that.
SR: A fella could even get laid that way.
WS: I mean, if he wanted.
Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to tonight's game, Will Smith!
SR: Are you conscious of that when you're coming here—"Yeah, gonna be on the Jumbotron tonight"?
WS: Never think about it ahead of time, and then right at the moment it's like, "Oh, damn." This is my first game of the year. I had an interesting revelation last year during the playoffs—the value of the sport and the value of sports in general, with the life lessons, the ups and downs. The depth of the life experience, what athletes are actually offering to us when they come out and play, if you look at a season and go moment by moment.
SR: It's a spiritual journey. It's a physical journey. It is a metaphor for life.
WS: A beautiful metaphor. People feel it, but we don't know.
SR: I prefer to see pro athletes as two-dimensional. I don't want to know they're human—that they're doing the best they can, that they cry when they lose, that they hurt.
WS: It's always so interesting to me. There are forty-four seconds left in the half. You can go in eleven up or six up. That's a life lesson that was always missed on me.
SR: Time management.
WS: Time management is a huge issue for me.
SR: One thing I learned from my time covering the Cleveland team was lotion is very important.
WS: What was the most important use that you saw?
SR: Just to keep the skin moist. They shower a lot. They sweat hard.
WS: They wear a lot of lotion.
SR: And up to that point, I didn't know that lotion was important. You know, I thought it was a girlie thing to do. But you gotta keep moist.
WS: I'm a cocoa-butter man. Because black people, we call it being ashy.
SR: I flake.
WS: White people get flaky, but black people get ashy. One of the worst things you can be as a child is ashy. Ashy is no good.
SR: You knew that early.
WS: My mother didn't play ashy.
SR: She was an educator?
WS: Yeah, she grew up in Pittsburgh. She went to Carnegie Mellon.
[Smith and Raab walk through the arena to a small, quiet room. Passersby request photos and autographs.]
Woman No. 1: How's your team look?
WS: Loving 'em!
SR: Always glad I'm not the famous guy.
[More photos, autographs.]
Woman No. 2: I'm, like, gonna cry. Thank you so much, nice to meet you. I am gonna cry. Like, I need to go to the bathroom.
Woman No. 3: You're awesome. What aren't you good at?
WS: A whole lot of things.
[Smith and Raab reach the quiet room.]
SR: Tough shoot in Pittsburgh?
WS: It feels so smooth and easy, but I guess it's just the emotionality of the piece is wearing me out. But it doesn't feel like it.
SR: You're playing a doctor?
WS: The doctor who discovered CTE [chronic traumatic encephalopathy: degeneration associated with repetitive brain trauma]. And it's his life, but on the set the real people stop by two or three times a week—the families of Mike Webster, Justin Strzelczyk, you know.
SR: Those Steelers teams especially took a horrible beating.
WS: It's a lot more emotionally battering. It's strange, because I feel like I have a really smooth and wonderful day, and then I come home and collapse.
SR: You've talked about acting as a challenge. But I've never heard you go into the emotionality of acting.
WS: With Six Degrees of Separation, I got a taste early of the dangers of going too far for a character. My character was in love with Stockard Channing's character. And I actually fell in love with Stockard Channing.
SR: Will Smith the human being did?
WS: Will Smith. So the movie was over and I went home, and I was dying to see Stockard. I was like, "Oh no! What have I done?" That was my last experience with Method acting, where you're reprogramming your mind. You're actually playing around with your psychology. You teach yourself to like things and to dislike things. It is a really dangerous place when you get good at it. But once I had that experience, I was like, No more Method acting. I was spending—for Six Degrees, I wanted to perform well so badly that I was spending six and seven and eight days in character before shooting, and you have to be careful with that.
SR: But you're the guy who keeps saving the world and all humankind.
WS: No, no, no. I really have that in me.
SR: I think you might—ah, you're joking.
WS: Yeah, I was joking. But I have the spirit of desire to make people's lives better. Being famous is such a gift for me because small things make people's lives brighter. You just shake somebody's hand. You just smile and write your name and people will talk about it for the rest of their lives.
SR: That's no joke.
WS: I watched my grandmother and my mother at Resurrection Baptist Church, and everything was about how you help others.
SR: Service.
WS: The quality of your life was determined by the quality of your service. I'm attracted to characters who have a higher calling, who want to serve in ways where you get beyond the comfortable service and you get into the space of the sacrificial. And I really am attracted to characters who just want to do things that brighten the world. That probably is the central aspect of my personality. If you started chipping things away, if there were one thing that was really at the core, it is trying to be like my grandmother. Her entire life was in service at Resurrection Baptist Church. And she was just always happy.
SR: You seem like a happy guy.
WS: I have fun. I enjoy my life. And I was hardwired for a deep connection between service, God, and happiness. You kind of need all of those things to be in play for one to have the others.
SR: Sometimes people don't want to go to the movie theater to feel the darkest feelings they have. Sometimes they just want to escape and feel thrilled.
WS: Escape and feel thrilled and have fun. I feel the higher quality of doing both things. That's really where I am and where I'm growing to in my mind and in my heart as I try to go into this next phase of my career. Marvin Gaye said there's a song inside of me and I can't get it out. And I know it's in there, and I can feel that it's in there, and I can't get it out. There's so much that I want to say, and I haven't been able to figure out how to say it in my art. I can only say it in ham-fisted, clumsy, nonpoetic ways, and I'm trying to figure out how to talk about life and talk about love and talk about pain and trials and tribulation in an artistic form.
SR: It's a long, tough process.
WS: It's excruciating. I always thought there was some place I was going, that there was some success or some achievement or some box-office number that was going to fill the hole. And what I realize is that life is a hole. It's a process of continually trying to find and reinvent myself. I'm the type of person who is always going to be somewhat dissatisfied with myself. I'm never going to be smart enough. I'm never going to be a good enough father. I'm never going to be a good enough husband. I'm never going to be a good enough actor for myself. I just never will be, and I have to get comfortable with waking up every day and trying to move some little increment closer to the person I have always dreamed of being.
SR: This is the journey.
WS: This is the journey.
SR: By the way, you can thank your father for the hole that's never going to be filled.
WS: Yes.
SR: You're never gonna get up early enough. You're never gonna work hard enough.
WS: I took pretty much a year and a half off. In 2010, basically everything that I had ever dreamed of had come true and the hole was still there, you know? In 2010, it was "Whip My Hair" [Willow Smith's hit single] and The Karate Kid, and Jada and I had just hosted the Nobel concert, and Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize and the only interview he did was with Jada and me. It was the best and the worst year of my life. It was everything that I had dreamed, and my family was battered by the conquest.
SR: They suffered emotionally? You weren't around?
WS: Well, no. We were doing it together, but—I grew up in a military household. My father was in the Air Force. It was hospital corners on our beds growing up.
SR: So working with Tommy Lee Jones was no big deal.
WS: Tommy Lee was easy.
SR: He's a tough interview. I said, "You're not too introspective, are you?" He said, "I am when someone pays me to be."
WS: That's hilarious. Tommy's great. Tommy is a fantastic intellect, and he is so deeply honest. He is brutally and beautifully honest. And I deeply appreciate that. And the only issue that I've found is that human beings are not creatures of logic; we are creatures of emotion. And we do not care what's true. We care how it feels. And, you know, Tommy's really logical.
SR: You were saying the family was going through a hard time?
WS: I love creating music and television and film. I love the hustle, I love the grind, I love working sixteen- and eighteen-hour days and waking up at four the next morning and going to the gym. I love that.
SR: You've called it a "psychotic" work ethic.
WS: But it's so enjoyable for me. And I had to make the transition into accepting that everybody doesn't want to do that. My kids taught me to redefine love. Before 2010, I had a vision. I saw a family in my mind that I wanted to have. And I was pushing and driving hard for my picture, and then I realized everyone has their own journey. I have to support what they want to do. I have to support the vision that they have for themselves, not my vision. That was excruciating for me. That was excruciating because I'm military-minded. And to have to back up off of the masculine in that way, to have to embrace a more gentle, understanding, loving, and caring side—that was a tough transition for me.
SR: You've talked about still having a poor person's mentality. The feeling that all of it could all go away.
WS: Anything can go away. There's no such thing as safety and security. You can do things that give you the illusion of safety and security, but there's really no such thing.
SR: It's been a bad year for illusions about race in America—in Ferguson and lots of places. How has that affected you?
WS: It's been rough for me trying to find my position in the struggle and where my voice is needed and helpful. You know, I grew up in Philadelphia, and Philadelphia has a really rough police-brutality history. I grew up in a neighborhood where it was very clear that the police were "them" and we were "us." I also know that when I was seventeen years old, I had a $20,000 car, which made it certain that I got pulled over all the time.
SR: What kind of car?
WS: I had a red IROC-Z. But I had the full stereo system and the rims and the paint job. I had all of that foolishness that made me get pulled over extra. And I had an attitude the second they pulled me over. "What? Why you pullin' me over?" I understand the difficulty and the pain, and there's no easy way out right now. The change that has to happen is about to be so brutal and so painful. It's not unlike the sixties. I think there's actually a deeper issue at play that America is going to have to face. What we're really talking about in this issue is people walking around the street with guns that can make a decision whether or not they're going to kill someone, right? And that's even more difficult, because there's really no way back from that. This is a gun culture. And it's painful for me, because I cannot figure out how to be helpful. I've always been telling my sons, We have to separate fault from responsibility—whose fault it is that black men are in this situation, whose fault it is doesn't matter. It's our responsibility to make it go right. It's our responsibility. It's a lot of people's fault, systemic racism, and it's a lot of people's fault that the black community is in the situation that we're in, but it's our responsibility to clean up the mess.
SR: On a much lighter note, I watched Focus [out February 27] the other day and you still look unbelievable. No stunt torso—you're still cut. You must work your butt off.
WS: I like to look good, but I like my body to function well more than anything. For me, it's as spiritual and intellectual as it is physical. And emotional. I'm a better husband, I'm a better father, if my body is physically functioning at the highest possible levels. I enjoy pushing myself. There is nothing like having to change your physical form to put you in contact with every weak part of yourself, to train yourself in discipline. You get confronted with all of the things you'll be confronted with in your marriage, confronted with in your parenting, confronted with in your job.
SR: Wisdom.
WS: Put somebody on a treadmill and I'll tell you how good they are at any other thing they do in life.
SR: When I met Robert Downey, they were still building the set for the first Iron Man, and he was worried about changing his body. He was looking at Daniel Craig. Do you look at other guys?
WS: That damn Wolverine. That's as good as it gets right there. I'm going for him. I'm going for Hugh Jackman. His body fat had to be around 4.
SR: And you?
WS: I'm 10 right now. I'm 10. You know, I was probably 8 for Focus.
SR: Do you look back and think of a peak?
WS: I got up to 225 for Ali. I was 183 for I Am Legend. It was 6 percent for I Am Legend, but that's way down. So 183 to 225 is a huge shift.
SR: Was Ali hard?
WS: It was excruciating.
SR: Emotionally?
WS: Emotionally, physically. Learn how to box, learn how to do an accent, and we were on multiple continents making the movie. But I had dinner with Nelson Mandela and Muhammad Ali. I would say that was probably the high point of my career.
SR: That's the pinnacle.
WS: That was the pinnacle. Nelson Mandela was on my left, and Muhammad Ali was on my right. And so I got fully aware that I meant absolutely nothing in this world.
SR: But you earned a place at that table.
WS: I read a Bruce Lee quote that shifted how I'm trying to live my life right now. He said, "Some targets are only meant to be aimed at." Right? And I took that to mean a shift for myself from goal orientation to path orientation. Everything I got, leave it on the floor. Right now my mind's not drifting to past interviews that didn't go right or in the future, I hope—nothing. It's right here, right now. The only thing that exists in this world right now is me and you.
SR: Was it your grandmother who said to you "Don't let success go to your head and failure go to your heart"?
WS: No, that was Daphne Maxwell Reid, Aunt Viv on Fresh Prince.
SR: I love that line.
WS: That was a valuable lesson for me a few years ago with After Earth. That was the most painful failure in my career.
SR: Worse than Wild Wild West?
WS: Wild Wild West was less painful than After Earth because my son was involved in After Earth and I led him into it. That was excruciating. What I learned from that failure is how you win. I got reinvigorated after the failure of After Earth. I stopped working for a year and a half. I had to dive into why it was so important for me to have number-one movies. And I never would have looked at myself in that way. I was a guy who, when I was fifteen my girlfriend cheated on me, and I decided that if I was number one, no woman would ever cheat on me. All I have to do is make sure that no one's ever better than me and I'll have the love that my heart yearns for. And I never released that and moved into a mature way of looking at the world and my artistry and love until the failure of After Earth, when I had to accept that it's not a good source of creation.
After Earth comes out, I get the box-office numbers on Monday and I was devastated for about twenty-four minutes, and then my phone rang and I found out my father had cancer. That put it in perspective—viciously. And I went right downstairs and got on the treadmill. And I was on the treadmill for about ninety minutes. And that Monday started the new phase of my life, a new concept: Only love is going to fill that hole. You can't win enough, you can't have enough money, you can't succeed enough. There is not enough. The only thing that will ever satiate that existential thirst is love. And I just remember that day I made the shift from wanting to be a winner to wanting to have the most powerful, deep, and beautiful relationships I could possibly have.
SR: Your kids catch a ton of crap on Twitter and elsewhere. That can't be fun.
WS: With this generation of kids growing up, the technological battering is almost the norm. They generally avoid the stuff. They're really well-adjusted around this business and understanding the nature of having to take a battering. It's a brutal world out there for young people, for everybody. Willow had one moment. The Young Turks are Willow's idol. They have a TV show online. They're like a really powerful group of young writers, hosts, and political commentators. Willow loves the Young Turks, and that was the only moment I saw her cry. Other than that, she's really well-adjusted with it. And Jaden understands that that's a part of this business. If he wants to do it, there's a certain amount of battery that you have to be willing to live through. We have a quote that I put up in the house from Pema Chödrön: "Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us." We call it leaning into the sharp parts. Something hurts, lean in. You just lean into that point until it loses its power over you. There's a certain amount of suffering that you have to be willing to sustain if you want to have a good life. And the trick is to be able to sustain it with your heart open and still be loving. That is the real trick.
SR: Art, not science.
WS: That's the thing that is painful: I always thought it was a science. I thought there was math. I was always looking for the math. As a parent, as a husband, as an actor, just as a human being, I suck a lot. You know, I suck so much more than I've thought that I should at forty-six. I hate not knowing what I should be doing. I don't mind not being where I'm going, but I hate not knowing where I should be going.
SR: You've talked about "slavery to dollars."
WS: You never lose the mentality. It's such a strange thing. Jaden, my sixteen-year-old, he has one pair of shoes.
SR: That's it?
WS: He has three pair of pants and he has five shirts.
SR: Total?
WS: Total. He has refused to be a slave to money. I so respect that. The younger generation is less of an ownership generation, anyway. And it's such an interesting thing to watch, because I came from a middle-class background, but, you know, our lights and gas would be cut off from not paying the bill. I grew up in a house where you would need the kerosene heaters in the winter in case the bills didn't get paid. And he's from the complete other end of the spectrum. And it's so interesting to me that from growing up in that space, he could see the need for things in a way that he's rejecting. He's like, "I'm not gonna let myself need things in that way"—but I would like him to get another pair of shoes.
SR: Are you enjoying any of the material fruits of your labor?
WS: There is a great line in Lawrence of Arabia. Anthony Quinn. "The Turks pay me a golden treasure, yet I am poor because I am a river to my people." I just love that line. So I'm getting a T-shirt made: I AM A RIVER TO MY PEOPLE. I just love that line. I want to take care of people. I want to help people. The maximum joy that I have is when I can create something that makes someone else's life lighter, brighter, or better. And I'm past cars and jewelry, you know? I don't even wear a watch.
Published in the March 2015 issue
