New York – It’s a story you’ve got to love. Because Will Smith, a natural-born griot, tells it with relish.
Since it’s also a tale of personal epiphany, you know he’s had time to hone its rhythms, its punch line. Still, the producer-star of “Pursuit of Happyness” is good at making it fresh. He’s one of those people – and typically they’re not actors – who invite you into the pool of their enthusiasm.
“I have an opposite reaction to things,” the 38-year-old says, leaning forward in his chair in a Manhattan hotel suite. “If there’s a big dude and I’m scared, I have to punch him.” His anecdote, though, poses the question: Who’s punching whom?
Smith was 14. He had just arrived at Overbrook High School in Philadelphia. The new kid.
As he begins to tattle on himself, Smith is the portrait of put-together. Gone are the longer hair, the mustache, the big glasses he wears as Chris Gardner, the struggling dad and brokerage firm hopeful whose real-life travails are captured in “Pursuit.”
Earlier, Smith’s co-star and real-life son Jaden Christopher Syre Smith was spotted exiting the elevator with Mom.
Gone, too, is the whiff of last-shot desperation. That faint but persistent odor infuses the plume of fear, need, but also focus, that puts Smith’s performance in a league with his boldest turns in “Ali” and “Six Degrees of Separation.” And Thursday, he was nominated for a Golden Globe for best actor in a drama. (The company he is in: Forest Whitaker, Leonardo DiCaprio and Peter O’Toole.)
Smith begins. “I walked into the lunchroom and there was about 500 kids. I was terrified. So I stood up on a table and said, ‘He’s here now. He’s here. You all can go back to what you’re doing. He’s here.”‘
A “big dude” came up to him and told him, unprintably, no one cared he was there. Smith replied: “I’ve only been here a few minutes. Give me a few more and your girlfriend’s going to care.”
Ten minutes later, in a stairwell, the guy hit Smith on the side of his head. He had a padlock balled in his fist.
“He knocked me unconscious,” says Smith, who woke to this realization: “Wow. This dude just potentially threw his life away. Definitely kicked out of school. Might go to jail. I remember thinking how much power I had over him.
“Teeth loose, bloodied, I felt powerful. And I remember wanting to learn how to use that power for good.”
Not many people can end a story about feeling powerful without sucking the air out of a room to inflate their own egos. But Smith is in the midst of pulling off a “boy becomes a man” point about what “The Pursuit of Happyness” means to him.
“This is the first time in my career I feel like I got the dragon,” he says. “I feel like I have developed enough talent and enough skill that the messages, the transformative ideas I believe in, I know how to artistically deliver them in a way that makes the world better.”
He continues with buzzy intensity, “My mind’s going crazy with the possibilities. This film on so many levels – on so many levels – the hope of what it could potentially inspire, even it it’s just somebody being able to get up.”
What Smith hopes is the movie will spark others the way Gardner’s story inspired him when he saw it told on ABC News’ “20/20.”
“That’s a man who got up off of a bathroom floor, washed his son in a sink and went to work,” he says with admiration. “Whoo.” He paused, adding another “whooo” for emphasis.
In portraying a guy who hits bottom at the same time he’s finally catching his big break at a brokerage firm, Smith doesn’t just take audiences into corporate offices, he and Jaden journey through some of our nation’s dark places.
The sweet revelation of “Pursuit of Happyness” is the debut of the younger Mr. Smith. With director Gabriele Muccino’s astute help, Jaden Smith hits notes of trust, crabbiness, excitement and confusion – all emotions a child faced with unacceptable homelessness feels.
“He’s such a natural,” Dad told a table of journalists earlier in the day. “He was nailing moment after moment.” It was a good thing that Jaden was his son, said Smith.
Why? “Cause I’d have been leaning into his close-ups.”
