‘Collateral’ gave Will Smith the tools to say goodbye
Actor, who lost his father last month, plays grieving dad
“Anything that doesn’t lead to a higher, more intimate relationship with yourself and others needs to be off your schedule.”
When Will Smith signed on for Collateral Beauty last summer, he never could have known just how personal it would become.
“I said yes, and three weeks later, my father was diagnosed with cancer,” says the actor, who plays a successful advertising executive grieving his daughter’s death in the star-studded holiday drama (in theaters Friday). Reading books about religion and the afterlife before shooting started wound up bringing him closer to his father, Willard Smith Sr., a refrigeration engineer and U.S. Air Force veteran. He died last month.
“Having to face my father’s mortality and impending death while I was preparing for this role gave us a really wonderful interaction during that time,” Smith says. “We were able to have conversations that I never would have been mature enough or open enough to have, and we confronted death head-on. So it was a beautiful way to prepare for a movie and an even more majestic way to say goodbye to my father.”
In Collateral, Howard (Smith) writes letters to abstractions such as love, death and time — all three of which, in a twist, take human form (played by Keira Knightley, Helen Mirren and Jacob Latimore) and track him down at Christmas in an effort to help him move on with his life.
Of the three, Smith considers love the most important concept, although “death has a way of burning away the (B.S.),” he says. “Anything that doesn’t lead to a higher, more intimate relationship with yourself and others needs to be off your schedule. It got very beautifully, painfully clear to me” this past year.
Smith, 48, remembers his father as a “massive idea teacher” who taught him “thousands of lessons” with a disarming sense of humor that stayed with him until the end.
“He FaceTimed me the night he passed, and he said, ‘Hey, man, I think it’s tonight,’ ” Smith says. “I said, ‘Really? OK.’ We sat and looked at each other for about 20 minutes, then somebody in the background said, ‘Daddio, you don’t have nothing you want to say to Will?’ He paused and said: ‘(Shoot). Anything I ain’t told this (expletive) up till now, he sure ain’t gonna get tonight.’ That was my dad.”
Latimore — a newcomer in the cast that also includes Kate Winslet, Edward Norton, Naomie Harris and Michael Peña — says that thankfully he hasn’t dealt with the deaths of close family members. But playing Time gave him a newfound appreciation for moments spent with his parents and grandparents.
“I’m just sort of, like, ‘ OK, let me pick up the phone and see how they’re doing,’ ” says Latimore, 20. “Or, ‘Let me pick up the phone more when they call me.’ ”
Smith laughs: “That’s hilarious. ‘I need to pick up the phone more when they call.’ ”
Adds Latimore: “Your grandparents, they’re the kings and queens of talking your ear off! It’s the reality of it. So it’s like, ‘Let me pick up this phone, even though it’s going to be a 45-minute phone call.’ ”