Will Smith’s new drama Seven Pounds is shrouded in mystery. All we can tell you is that Smith plays an IRS agent named Ben Thomas who’s looking for a little good karma to bring balance to his life.
He’s not the cocky guy you’d think.
“I work from almost a dangerous place in my mind sometimes. I work from the yin and the yang of hope and fear, right? I think at essence, I am fearful, right? I live and I’m motivated by the pain of Jada not loving me one day, right? I’m motivated by the fear of not being able to help my kids when there’s something that they want to do, right? But because I know that hope and fear are connected, I put my mask of hope on, right? So I just live in the hopeful side, but I know it’s the same thing. When the truth of it gets revealed in my private moments, I have a real battle to fight to get back over to the yin side, the hopeful side of that sphere.”
Whoa — where does that come from?!
“I have been successful over the past few years, but you can’t break poor-people mentality. Once you grow up poor, you don’t take anything for granted, you can never truly be relaxed. You are kind of all right things are going well, but there is that feeling. I remember my father was the dude who would climb up the pole when the electricity got cut off, and he would turn it back on. What that life was and what those experiences were growing up I can remember fondly in anecdotes now, but how devastating a space that must have been for my father — I can never shake that feeling.”
He can’t explain his Seven Pounds character any better than the previews.
“He is looking to un-ring a bell, and you really can’t. In his mind he feels like God made a mistake, so he is turning his engineering mind on fixing something that is totally unfixable by our standards.”
Let’s try again …
“Ben looks at people like they have a mask on. So he’s trying to look under people’s mask, right? So I think that when Ben would be looking at me, he’d be concerned that I’m aware that he has a mask on and I have a mask on and I’m okay with the masks but we’ll keep talking until we’re both comfortable enough to take our masks off. I think it’d be a little too calculated for Ben.”
Well, we do know he found it hard to leave Ben at work.
“Jaden is my man; he keeps me aware of everything that is going on around the house. Anything I need to know, he’ll pull me up and let me know. Family dinner is a big thing at our house so it was really quiet one day, so I lean over to Jaden and said, ‘Hey man, why is it so quiet?’ And he said, ‘Because you look crazy!’”
He’s ready for I Am Legend round two.
“We have a very, very cool prequel idea. In essence, it’s not the title but the idea of it is the last stand of Manhattan. It’ll be the fall of Manhattan, the last American city to fall … It would be an ensemble. The feeling of it that we’ve been talking about would be essentially Saving Private Ryan.”
And a Hancock sequel.
“The ideas aren’t as developed for Hancock yet, but we are currently building out an entire world. I think people are going to be very surprised at the new world of Hancock … Potentially, yes [there will be more superheroes].”
But if there is one movie franchise he can’t get enough of, it would be Bad Boys.
“Let me tell you, I would do up to Bad Boys 6 if I could. I have so much fun working with Martin Lawrence. I love Miami. It’s like that little boy fantasy with fast cars and girls and I got the gun and the bad guy’s always lose. It’s like I would make Bad Boys forever.”
