RD Face to Face: Will Smith

By Meg Grant
From Reader's Digest Magazine


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There’s a Rubik’s cube on the coffee table, not a metre from where Will Smith sits relaxing in the fifth-floor living room of his riverfront home in New York. The one-time teen star, who started his career as a rap artist, then became an actor and movie producer and is now practically a one-man entertainment industry, has a simple philosophy: “I can do it.” 

Smith, 38, is talking about the cube, but that’s also the way he looks at pretty much everything. From his dad, he says, he learnt to look for patterns in life, and puzzle out how to make them work in his favour. From his mother he learnt the value of knowledge, even though he left formal education after high school. And from somewhere, Smith discovered an unshakable belief that he can accomplish anything he sets his mind to.

So far, he has. At age 12, he began performing rap music at parties in his home city of Philadelphia. By the time he was 20, his upbeat lyrics had translated into seven Billboard hits and won him a Grammy.

At 21, Smith moved to Hollywood and landed a starring role on the hit TV sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, then went on to pursue his dream of becoming a movie star. Films such as Independence Day, Enemy of the State and Ali, for which he was nominated for an Oscar, proved that, yes, Will Smith can do it.

Smith is married to musician and actress Jada Pinkett Smith and is the father of three children – Willard III, 13 (from his first marriage), Jaden, 8, and Willow, 6. To keep fit, he runs – perhaps the perfect pastime for a man who can never seem to slow down. Wearing jogging pants and large diamond studs in his ears, he sat down with Reader’s Digest to talk about his family, fame and fortune, as well as The Pursuit of Happyness (which, by the way, is the title of his new movie).

RD: You grew up in Philadelphia in the 1970s. What was your neighbourhood like?

Smith: It was probably 50% Jewish. One neighbourhood over were all the pretty little Muslim girls. Mine was a Baptist household, and I went to a Catholic school. I was surrounded by different religions.

RD: What was your experience growing up black in this neighbourhood?

Smith: My school was 90% white, but 90% of the kids I played with were black. So I got the best of both worlds. I think that is where my comedy developed. In black neighbourhoods, everybody appreciated comedy about real life. In the white community, fantasy was funnier. I started looking for the jokes that were equally hilarious across the board, for totally different reasons.

RD: Is it true that at one point you were planning to go to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)?

Smith: My mother, who worked for the School Board of Philadelphia, had a friend who was MIT’s admissions officer. I had pretty good high school marks and they needed black kids, so I probably could have got in. But I had no intention of going to university.

RD: Because you got a record deal?

Smith: My first record came out while I was a senior in high school, which is dangerous. Life is too good.

RD: So what did you say your parents?

Smith: I told my parents I wanted to rap. They said, “Rap?” My mother, who graduated from Carnegie Mellon, thought university was the only way. My father could kind of see doing something differently. We agreed that I would take a year making music, and if it did not work out, I would go to university. That year, we won the first Grammy given to a rap artist.

RD: How did your mother react?

Smith: She backed up a little bit. I sent her a 300E Mercedes, and she was cool.

RD: Have you ever thought about going back to study?

Smith: The things that have been most valuable to me I did not learn in school. Traditional education is based on facts and figures and passing tests – not on a comprehension of the material and its application to your life. Jada and I homeschool our children, because the date of the Boston Tea Party does not matter.

RD: But there are some basics in education that need to be taught.

Smith: Of course there are. Reading, writing and arithmetic, because those are the languages of our country.

RD: When you say you homeschool, do you mean you actually teach them?

Smith: No, we have hired teachers who teach what we feel is important. For example, Plato’s Republic – kids need to know that. Why is that not taught in first grade?

RD: You think kids in primary school should read Plato’s Republic?

Smith: Yeah. You cannot be an American without reading it and Aristotle’s Politics. That is what the forefathers of this country read, and they used them to create what I believe is the finest system of government that has ever existed.

RD: So, you don’t see any reason to go back to a formal education yourself?

Smith: I know how to learn anything I want to learn. I absolutely know that I could learn how to fly the space shuttle, because someone else knows how to fly it, and they put it in a book. Give me the book, and I do not need somebody to stand up in front of the class.

RD: They put physics in a book, but I know I could never be a physicist.

Smith: The first step is you have to say that you can.

RD: In The Pursuit of Happyness, you play the real-life self-made millionaire Chris Gardner, who in the early ’80s was a single father living on the streets with his son.

But he got an internship at an investment bank and ended up a multimillionaire, the owner of his own brokerage firm. He was a very determined man who believed in himself, and you seem to share similar views on life.

Smith: The thing I connected to was his desire to win.

RD: Deciding that if you want to do something, you’re going to do it?

Smith: Absolutely.