Terrified of not being in love

LOS ANGELES — In a story filed by this writer a week ago, Rosario Dawson dished, albeit teasingly, how extremely nervous Will Smith was about their pivotal love scene in Columbia Pictures’ powerful and highly-charged drama Seven Pounds.

It turned out Will has several reasons why he acted that way. But being nervous was not one of those. “Hold on, wait. I know I had no problem with it,” he clarified, while trying not to laugh too hard, after we asked him to comment on what his co-star had told us.

Will and Rosario met with this writer in separate round table interviews in early December during the junket held at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. He explained that he “never wanted to be that guy that, you know, you’re in the scene and, something — your hand — rubs across her breasts like you are getting a little cheap quick feel. It is just so painful for me to think that a woman would think that I was trying to do something like that. It wasn’t the sex scene, it was, like, I didn’t want her to feel disrespected. I wanted her to feel comfortable in my presence.”

He laughed harder when told that Rosario also spilled that his wife, Jada Pinkett-Smith, was in the room coaching him during the shoot. “Jada and Rosario both felt that wasn’t a good idea. Jada said, ‘Listen, you better stop it right now, go in there, and do what you do. I don’t want people looking at me crazy. You go in there and show them how you put it down.’ It’s just so awkward. There’s a cameraman there and you got no clothes and, you know, you hear (he clears his throat). It is really strange but I wasn’t scared, though.”

So what would scare Will Smith when he is considered to be Hollywood’s biggest superstar? Corny, it seems, but Will confessed to being “terrified of not being in love.” He also expressed fear that his core fans may find his new film more challenging than his previous two films. “When I make a movie, the ending is — we talk about in philosophical terms — 70 percent of your movie, so you make sure that you send people out of the theater with the right idea and the right energy and they know what they came to see and...” he stopped mid-sentence and added “this is so drastically different.”

In Seven Pounds, Will stars as the mysterious IRS agent Ben Thomas. Haunted by a terrible secret, he sets out to redeem himself by transforming the lives of seven carefully selected individuals. When his goal was set in motion, he did not plan on falling in love with one of the seven strangers. Should he give in to love and forget his plan? Should he allow this woman to change how he views his life and that of the lives of others?

“I am terrified. For me, it doesn’t have to ‘open’ but just enough for it to ‘play.’ In showbiz-speak ‘open’ means huge weekend gross and ‘play’ means consistently playing to large crowds for at least five weeks before bowing out of the weekly Top 10 films ranking — by which time, it is presumed that the movie has recouped much of its budget. It’s a tough season. The film is fantastic but I am terrified about making it past through the audience.”

That is quite surprising from someone who is 2008’s biggest moneymaker. Will is currently at the prime of his career. He is enjoying a string of golden box-office success that his best buddy Tom Cruise had before Tom’s disappointing fall in popularity after an ill-advised couch-jumping on Oprah’s show and the backlash that followed over his affiliation with Scientology, which Will denies being a part of in a Newsweek interview that came out in December.

Will also enjoys one of the most enduring marriages in Hollywood. “Everything is funny to me. It’s annoying sometime to my family but I just don’t allow myself to embrace only the negative side of something. I went through a divorce. I can say it’s a failure, that it’s a mistake. But that’s not really true because that divorce becomes a part of the success of my marriage to Jada. That is one of the reasons why I am successful in my love and marriage. It’s really the view of it. I just don’t look at things as mistakes and that if I just focus I can flip it into something that is positive.”

The actor also hit another milestone last year: He turned 40. “Turning 40 didn’t even register in my mind,” he said. It only hit him when his son (from his first marriage) turned 16. He found himself one morning sitting in the passenger seat and his son was driving, and that’s when he realized, “Oh my God, I am 40 — I am getting old,” he recalled thinking to himself.

Old at 40, maybe, but many would agree that the superstar has got many years more to stay on top as king of Hollywood.

Seven Pounds is now showing in theaters.