Leaping Fresh Prince From Rap To TV To Big Screen Movies, Will Smith’s Success Comes From Taking Risks

Will Smith knows the secret of his success, and he’s happy to reveal it by telling a story: He was standing at the top of a cliff in Jamaica a couple of years ago overlooking a five-story drop to the ocean.

“There were big ‘danger’ signs posted all over the place, and I was petrified,” he says. “And it was driving me crazy to have to stand there and be afraid of this cliff. It was like doing the first episode of ‘Fresh Prince of Bel Air,”’ the NBC sitcom in which he starred for six seasons. “But my reaction to being scared is to attack what I am afraid of. So I jumped off the cliff.”

But Smith isn’t finished. Another swimmer had to rescue him. Why? Smith can’t swim.

“I just hated being scared of the cliff,” he says.

Smith has made a career of leaping into endeavors for which he seemed barely prepared. As a precocious 12-year-old, he formed a rap duo that went on to win two Grammy Awards. By 20 he was a millionaire.

Then he waltzed into the “Fresh Prince” sitcom without any acting credentials. Later, when he braved the often-fatal career jump to the big screen, he did so in the risky and much-praised role of a homosexual con man in the 1993 film version of John Guare’s play “Six Degrees of Separation.”

Now, at 28 and perhaps right in character, he’s back for another summer of high-action derring-do in the droll “Men in Black,” a science fiction crowd pleaser in which he and Tommy Lee Jones help save the planet from extraterrestrials, a job not unlike the one he had in last summer’s megahit “Independence Day.”

And soon he’ll start another brave new career, again without any training: he’s going to be immortalized in plastic, as the toy action figure Flame Blastin’ Agent Jay, named after his character in “Men in Black.”

In the movie, which opens Wednesday, Smith plays a flamboyant New York City policeman who is recruited by a dour secret agent (Jones) to keep order among aliens who, unbeknown to the public, have already settled on Earth.

“Will’s character comes in cocky, thinking he knows everything, even though he doesn’t have a clue,” says Barry Sonnenfeld, who directed the film and who sees a bit of the character, the self-assured part, in Smith himself.

“Will has an overwhelming sense of self-confidence that registers as, maybe this isn’t so hard; maybe I can just go in there and do it,” Sonnenfeld says.

Indeed, Smith, wearing an oversize golf shirt and white baggy pants, is a picture of self-possession while sitting for an interview in a Los Angeles restaurant. In fact, with his closely cropped hair, small, protruding ears and quick smile, he resembles a friendly character in a Dr. Seuss book or perhaps a teddy bear by Giacometti.

Smith’s confidence showed up early. Not for nothing did a Philadelphia grade-school teacher dub him Prince, as in Charming. “He was the first one to jump off the steps, the first to climb up the trees,” says Jeff Townes, aka D.J. Jazzy Jeff, the other half of Smith’s rap duo, D.J. Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. “Everybody watched and followed later.”

But Smith says he drew the line at drugs, partly out of fear of his father. “I had more than enough opportunities to try drugs, but I really felt that my father would kill me,” he says. “Not in the comedic sense. I felt like my father would take my life!”

Today Smith credits much of his success to the strict upbringing that his father, an electrician, and his mother, a school-board administrator, gave their four children (Smith has an older sister and younger twin brother and sister). A kind of multicultural atmosphere also influenced him in his early years.

“I grew up in a Baptist household, went to a Catholic school, lived in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood and hung with the Muslim kids,” Smith says.

Which is not to say there was no bigotry. “In Catholic school, people who were supposed to be representatives of our creator treated the black kids differently, and that was hard on me,” he says.

But he also learned from that experience. “It made me forge a personal relationship with my creator, and it made me deal with the fact that to many people I’m a ‘nigger.”’

As a boy he was always a ham. “There I am in my parents’ videotapes, days old, right in front, performing for the camera, smiling away with no teeth.” He loved dinosaurs and might have pursued a career as a paleontologist if he hadn’t discovered rapping before he was in his teens.

What does a 12-year-old have to rap about? As befits his sunny nature, Smith came up with an uptempo, nonthreatening brand of hip-hop that hit big with the MTV generation.

He and D.J. Jazzy Jeff cut three albums that went platinum and, in 1989, won the first Grammy ever awarded to a rap act, for their single “Parents Just Don’t Understand.”

But it was a 900-number phone line on which he and D.J. Jazzy Jeff left recorded messages for their fans that made him a millionaire. By the time Smith was 21, however, a large portion of that money had been spent (cars, houses), and he was becoming restless, wanting to expand his professional horizons.

Putting his rap career on hold (he and his partner have lately begun working on a new album), he moved to a rented apartment in Burbank, Calif., to look for work.

Then fate intervened. He was walking across a parking lot one day, intending to hang out backstage at “The Arsenio Hall Show,” when he stopped a man to ask for directions. The man happened to be a producer who knew of Smith’s reputation as a rapper and who, as it happened, wanted to produce a television series about an urban kid who moves to Los Angeles to live with rich relatives. And that’s how the fish out of water landed a job playing the fish out of water in “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.”

Before long, his success as a likable, good-natured rap star and sitcom character paved the way to a third career, in movies. He started by winning small roles in “Where the Day Takes You” (1992) and “Made in America” (1993) before getting his first major part, in “Six Degrees of Separation.”

Next came the action-adventure film “Bad Boys” (1995), for which he perfected his pectorals. But it wasn’t until the apocalyptic “Independence Day,” working opposite Jeff Goldblum, that he earned his stripes as a star.

To hear Smith tell it, though, neither luck nor exceptional talent has made him a star. “I don’t know if I’m arrogant, but it’s a plus to me that people are lazy,” he says. “I take comfort in knowing that even if someone’s more talented, a better rapper or actor than I am, they’re not going to put in the hours I put in. I have this really psychotic drive. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, until what I start is finished to the best of my ability.”