Jada Pinkett Smith: redefining Hollywood stardom, marriage & motherhood

Ebony, Sept, 2004 by Joy Bennett Kinnon

WHAT Jada wants, Jada gets--from life, from the movie industry, from her children, and from Will.

The petite powerhouse is no pushover. She has a pragmatic if not downright pugnacious approach to the Hollywood game.

"I'm a do-me--you-do-you person," she says. "And if you want to stand in my way, fine, we're going to figure out how this is going to go down. Because I'm a have-what-I-want-one-way-or-another woman." She says she has always been like that. "I've definitely been a get-up-and-go-get-it-now person."

And she has gotten it.

In the more than 10 years since she crept quietly on the scene in Menace II Society in 1993, she has played a series of strong and memorable lead characters in Jason's Lyric, Woo and Set it Off. During this period she married industry powerhouse Will Smith and went on to help create one of the most exciting and unconventional Hollywood marriages. In the process, she defines, and is still defining, what it means to be a mother, movie star and the wife of a movie star.

She later starred in Spike Lee's Bamboozled and opposite her husband in Ali and became an action star in the high-profile sequels The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions. Currently she plays United States Attorney Annie Farrell, a marked woman, in the thriller Collateral, with Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx.

Known for her uncanny precision in choosing roles, Pinkett Smith, who is 32, and will turn 33 this month, says she decided to star in Collateral for a different reason. "I would do anything for Michael Mann," she says. "He is my absolute favorite director in the world." She hadn't even read the script when Mann called her for the role. "He told me he needed a woman to play this [character] who is not a pushover, but who is also going to be able to show a more vulnerable aspect of herself."

She says she prefers not to play vulnerable women onscreen, which is one reason most of her characters have a sharp edge. "I don't like it when women are portrayed one way in movies," she says. "I don't like super strong women, and I don't like totally wimp women. All women wear many hats, so it's very difficult to find roles that portray women as we really are."

Although she may not enjoy portraying vulnerable women onscreen, her fans find her eminently approachable. Asian tourists to Harlem home girls greet her with a "Hey, Jada!" as she walks down a busy New York street. She graciously signs autographs and takes pictures with her fans and seems genuinely touched when a Black man old enough to be her grandfather drops to one knee, serenading her with "This Magic Moment." He tells her to tell Will to stay on his game. "Because if I was 35 years younger, I'd give him a run for his money." Her laughter peals out as she exclaims, "I can dig it, and I'll tell him!"

Over lunch at a sidewalk cafe, Pinkett Smith expounds easily on life, love and her career. She says she looks for variety when she chooses her roles because she gets bored quickly. Eddie Murphy told her to forget about competing with anybody else. "I've learned there is no competition for me--there ain't no rat race. I only compete with myself. I think we have to teach our children that you better peer inside of yourself--what are you doing? Are you the best that you can be? Forget what the chick next to you is doing, that's a non-issue."

It was that frustration with finding quality roles that took her out of the Hollywood game for a couple of years in the late '90s. The Baltimore native married actor-singer Will Smith in 1997 and the pair's first son, Jaden Christopher Syre Smith, was born in 1998. Her marriage and her son's birth sparked her self-imposed sabbatical. Her daughter, Willow Camille Reign Smith, was born in 2000.

"After I had Jaden, I decided to take about two years off, but Spike called me and pulled me out of that sabbatical," she says. "So having to work with Spike, Michael Mann and the Wachowski Brothers really put some fire back in my soul for this game again." Filming The Matrix, she says, was an eye-opening experience for her. "I turned into a whole different person after The Matrix, and Larry taught me that life is about research. Expand your mind, expand your life. You can't be complacent and content." At the end of the day, she says the Hollywood game is not fair to anybody. "Hollywood is not kind to anybody; it's not a kind industry," she says.

So why bother, why work at all? She's beautiful, talented and has a Hollywood-handsome, rap star-rich husband. She laughs at the question. "People say that to me all the time," she says. "The industry thinks this is like a hobby for me now, and it's not," she adds. "It's a part of who I am. If I let this aspect of myself go--I die. Period. It's that simple. It would be a spiritual death." She says Will is confident, smart and comfortable enough with himself to understand that. She says most men in his position would say, 'Why are you working? Why aren't you here with me, up under me all day long, fulfilling every last need I have?'" And she has the quintessential Jada reply to that question. "He knows that it's not about that. He knows that when I get back, I can still fulfill every need he has and more," she adds. "Because he has given me that opportunity to do what I need to do for myself, that fills me with more strength to be that source of comfort and love for him."