‘Life is delicious right now’: A ‘new’ Will Smith talks music, childhood, Philly grit, and turning his search inward

Will Smith enters the Zoom room eager to talk about Based on a True Story, the “West Philadelphia born-and-raised” rapper and actor’s first album in 20 years.

The new music arrives three years after Smith winning the best actor Oscar for playing Venus and Serena Williams’ father in King Richard. And after the infamous slapping incident that same night.

Based on a True Story doesn’t run from the incident. The first words heard on the album are “Will Smith is canceled,” in a humorous skit called “Int. Barbershop Day,” featuring longtime collaborator DJ Jazzy Jeff Townes.

Smith voices characters expressing opinions: from “Will Smith is whack” to “He put all Philly on his back,” which rhymes with “he won the first Grammy for rap.” Which he did, with Townes, for “Parents Just Don’t Understand” in 1989.

But True Story — part of a comeback that’s included last year’s hit Bad Boys: Ride or Die and a street renaming ceremony in West Philly last month — doesn’t foreground being funny like past hits “Summertime” or “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It.”

Instead, it’s serious, drawing on gospel music and guest appearances by Philly singer Fridayy and Smith’s son Jaden as he digs into soul-searching struggles.

But for all that torment, Smith, 56, was cheerful and upbeat, speaking from his home outside Los Angeles, sitting in his den with a photo of Muhammad Ali — whom he played in a 2001 Oscar-nominated performance — on the wall behind him and a red Phillies cap on his head.

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

All is in divine order. Life is delicious right now.

You know how some days life just makes sense? I’ve had about eight months where it just absolutely makes perfect sense.

Unfortunately, the universe teaches through suffering.

Yeah, the last couple of years. And I call it suffering, but it was a little bit less than suffering, because I knew I was being forged and educated. I knew it was curriculum. I knew I was in a place where I was going into the chrysalis and turning to liquid in order to become the new butterfly.

I never call things self-inflicted, because everybody is taking the same journey. There’s a handful of things we all have to face as humans, and we have to reconcile them in order to be happy here, whether it’s self-inflicted or life-inflicted.

Everybody is going to have a beautiful rise, everybody’s going to have a difficult fall. Everybody’s going to lose a loved one, everybody is going to be mistreated by someone … there’s a handful of things that we’re all going to experience.

For me, the self — and the perception of the self — was part of the problem. My perception of moral superiority — it was great to have had that disillusioned in order to discover more expanded parts of myself.

I realized I absolutely didn’t. That making money and winning awards is not a sign of having comprehension of oneself and others. You can absolutely be materially successful without being wise.

It was almost like I didn’t have a choice. The best way I can describe it is there are parts of ourselves we don’t like, and parts of ourselves that we think, if we are those things, other people won’t like us.

So we push them down. We push down our anger, our sadness, our fear, our confusion. We hold a posture like we know, even when we know we don’t.

So for me, when those things popped, there was an ugly period of having to be honest with myself. I was scared.

Yes. There was this awful period with all these things I haven’t wanted to look at. And then I realized underneath all of that was a well of creativity and new ideas and power and love, and I was actually suppressing this wild abundance and vastness of myself.

So as I got over the initial struggle, that was a big thing with my kids, to be able to say: ‘I don’t know.’ Because I always had to pretend I’m Super Dad. I had to pretend I knew.

I started exploring that and making friends with my fear, my anger, my confusion. Admitting I’m sad. ‘Not Will Smith. Will Smith don’t get sad!’ That’s a long way to say a whole new artistic life awakened after I started looking under all of those aspects of myself.

All of it. I read the Torah from cover to cover. I read the Bible from cover to cover. I read the Quran. The Bhagavad Gita. I read the teachings of the Buddha, studied the Egyptian mysteries. I went searching for: What is the big answer?

For me, to put it as as simply as I can. … It was detox everything and do not take my eyes away from my own mind. Do not run from me.

Turning my search lights inward. ... And the recognition that if I don’t want to be with me, nobody’s gonna want to be with me.

Under normal circumstances, I would be looking for a hit. I know how to make hits, right? And for this album, the goal was pure authenticity. I was trying to have the things correspond with what was going on with me, rather than what I thought people wanted to hear from me.

There’s Will Smith as a brand, and then there’s Will Smith as a man. And sometimes those things are at odds. And I’m trying to get more comfortable being the honest version of Will Smith the man, while honoring the promises of the brand.

So when I go on tour, I’m gonna perform, ‘Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It.’ But there’s also other thoughts that I’m having, other feelings.

I have never performed in Europe. So I wanted to go to Europe this summer, and do shows in places I’ve never performed. And then come back to the United States.

Will Smith Way.

It was surprisingly emotional. It was a really beautiful homecoming. And the name of the street hit me harder than I thought, right? All of the kids who come out of the high school I went to — Overbrook High School — when they step out, they’re stepping out onto Will Smith Way.

I want to go back to the school, and define for students what the ‘Will Smith Way’ is. Not that you listen when you’re in high school, but you just want the right seeds planted.

For ninth grade. I didn’t do well! It was kind of like The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. I went to Our Lady of Lourdes. My entire K-through-8 was in Catholic school, so my parents wanted to continue that. And my grandmother was really, really religious, so she wanted me in a school with Christ at the center.

But Archbishop Carroll was a haul, and Overbrook was walking distance from my house, and my father’s business. So my parents determined it would be better for me psychologically to know my father could walk into the school at any time.

Oh my goodness, a big part of understanding Richard Williams was understanding my dad. They were pretty much from that same era, with very similar experiences, very similar perspectives of the world, very similar work ethics. They both dreamed in a way that seems delusional. My father had that also.

I did my bid. Right now I’m on a prison work release.

There are a couple of things in the hopper. Me and Michael Bay are up next. Literally, the day I finish the tour, I start shooting with Michael. It’s called Fast and Loose. It’s a new franchise. Nostalgia is gigantic right now. The difficulty in the world is such that everything old is new. So we were like. ‘Let’s do an action movie.’

I love India, and I’m working with music now so I want to reach out to global artists. It’s almost an educational process for me. I just did a verse over a Japanese record, Yuki Chiba’s ‘Team Tomodachi.’ It’s critical to me to be a part of a sense of oneness and unity in the world in this time of fear and anger and division.

What I’ve been able to build my career on is, on the inside, I can muster all the toughness and grit that is necessary to be worthy of wearing this hat. [Points to his Phillies cap] But part of my personality is there’s also a joyful buoyancy on top of that.

So I think the combination of those things are unique, in what I’ve been able to create within and without. To have those energies to call on, but to not have them driving the bus.