ILLUSTRATION CHRISTOPHER LEE LYONS

WILL SMITH

IT’S 2018, AND Will Smith is on a date. The immaculate venue is the Cayman Islands. The view is spectacular. The wine is expensive. But something is… off.

No matter what Smith tries, he can’t seem to connect with the other person at the table. His best material is met with an unimpressed stare and a long, awkward pause. When talk turns to ’80s hip-hop music, his date quickly reveals that she’s not a fan of his work. And most embarrassingly, when Smith moves in for a kiss he is told, “I think we can be friends.”

It’s an encounter that’s noteworthy for two reasons. First — someone has finally rebuffed Smith’s charms. Second — that someone is not in fact a human, but Sophia, a super-advanced robot whom Smith is meeting for a video on his YouTube channel. The two details are not mutually exclusive.

Those of us who aren’t governed by zeros and ones have had a much harder time resisting Smith’s charisma over the past three decades.

Bursting onto our screens as an enthusiastic teenager, it didn’t take him long to bust into the mainstream, taking any role he wanted and blazing a trail for other Black actors to follow.

That he has sustained his A-list status for so long shows an astounding level of consistency, even when the material has been sub-par. That’s in large part because, instead of disappearing into his roles, Smith has put more of himself into the characters he plays, imbuing almost all of them with an infectious likeability. His weapons-grade charm can’t help but shine through.

Willard Carroll Smith Jr was born and raised in West Philadelphia, to school-board administrator Caroline Bright and US Air Force veteran Willard Carroll Smith Sr. Although Smith had pretty high SAT scores as a teen and was admitted to a pre-engineering programme at MIT — clearly he didn’t spend most of his days chillin’ out, maxin’ and relaxin’ on the playground — he never went through with it because he wanted to rap. Such ambition and confidence spoke to a lesson his father had instilled in him early on in his life: “No plan B. It distracts from plan A.”

For a while, plan A worked a treat. Smith and his childhood friend Jeffrey Townes joined forces in 1985, becoming lighthearted rap duo DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince, and success quickly followed. Their second album went triple-platinum, and their popular single ‘Parents Just Don’t Understand’ earned them their first Grammy for Best Rap Performance. Young and rich, Smith splurged on everything from motorcycles to extravagant clothes. But when their third album flopped in 1989, the 20-year-old Smith — who had underpaid his taxes — found himself in hot water with the IRS, who seized his possessions and garnished his income. The Fresh Prince was The Broke Prince.

It was then that a desperate Smith took the advice of his girlfriend to go on The Arsenio Hall Show. That’s where he met Benny Medina — the real-life inspiration behind The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air — who told him the idea for the show and introduced him to Quincy Jones at a house party hosted by the legendary producer in December 1989. It was there that Smith was given a life-changing choice: schedule a meeting with NBC a week from now, or take ten minutes to study the pages and shoot his shot that day. Smith, who had barely acted a day in his life, took the daring choice and found himself auditioning on the spot to a room full of celebrities, politicians, plus head of NBC Brandon Tartikoff, to raucous applause.