Thursday, May 24, 2012

30 MINUTES WITH Jada Pinkett Smith / 'I'm scared of clowns'

Jada Pinkett Smith

3O MINUTES WITH

Jada Pinkett Smith: 'I'm scared of clowns'

What's it like being the voice of the hippo in the Madagascar films and the wife of Will Smith?

Catherine Shoard
Thu 24 May 2012

Jada Pinkett Smith with her co-stars and a lion at the Madagascar 3 photocall in Cannes. Photograph: Loic Venance/AFP/Getty Images

Hello! How's Cannes?

It's very busy and very beautiful. Oh my goodness. Usually when I have come it's rainy. The first time here I was 20, for Menace II Society. Oh boy, I didn't know anything then. My outfits were just … woah. (1)

Did you have to sleep on the floor?

No, fortunately not. It was a good time to just be naive and young and know absolutely nothing.

Do you ever feel limited doing cartoons? (2)

You have as much space as you need. If I go into a session and I do something and go: "I wasn't happy with that, I'd like to do that again," they say: "OK, not a problem." Whereas, in live action, I tell ya what: it's best that you figure it out that day. You can go back, but there's a lot more studio executives involved on that call. I always have to come back, anyway. I'm the only one out of all of them (3) that never gives a bunch of different options of line readings. I can only imagine what we'd create if we were in a room together.

Jada Pinkett Smith

Will Smith returns to the screen this week in Men in Black 3 and has been speaking about taking four years out so that your children could pursue their acting and singing. (4)

I really needed him by my side. I'm only one person. I needed Daddy.

Do you ever fear your children's careers are taking off too fast?

I'm not one about trying to slow things down. What I try to do is create an atmosphere for my family where we can pretty much have whatever. Because no one can control life, can we? We like to believe that we can but actually we cannot. So what I try to do is create an atmosphere where my children can have whatever comes. Because that is what life is about. Because we could walk out of this room right now and have our lives completely change. That's just the truth of it. And I surely am not going to try to control the current. Lord knows I tried that in my own life. For me to think that I could ever do that for someone else. Boy! I'm not gonna set myself up in that way. I can barely control my own doggone current! So I'm there in great support and so that they can have whatever the higher power has to offer them.

This latest Madagascar film comes down pretty hard against taxidermy. Have your own views on that, or zoos, or circuses, been affected by making the film?

I'm scared of clowns. (5)

You recently spent four months in China.

It's so raw. What you see is what you get. I love that. And my daughter learned Mandarin and when we were at the Nobel peace prize we were on the stage, speaking Mandarin. So, y'know, yeah! Fantastic. I wish she had kept it up. She has a brain. She's very good with languages. She picks them up like this (6). Her next is Spanish. She's like her father in that way. Jaden and I on the other hand … we're the artists.

Has Madagascar affected your approach to work?

The only thing is that when parents introduce me to their kids they say: "She's Gloria!" And they go: "Oh my God! Gloria?" You get the nursery school crowd.

So you're making music again?

We are. We're called Wicked Evolution (7). It's purely creative. I'm in this whole flow of doing certain art pieces without commerce. It's free, you can just have it. I had to get into a place for myself of thinking what I would create for myself if I didn't have to worry about making money. I make my music strictly passion. I'm tired of limitations.

Madagascar 3 went down a storm in Cannes and is released on 19 October

Foot notes

(1) Pinkett Smith is currently wearing a navy-blue, deep-plunge, hot-panted playsuit.

(2) She is in Cannes to promote the out-of-competition film Madagascar 3, in which she voices Gloria, a forthright hippo.

(3) Ben Stiller is the lion, Chris Rock the zebra, David Schwimmer the giraffe with whom Pinkett-Smith's character is romatically involved. The third instalment introduces Jessica Chastain as a seductive tigeress and Michael Short as an Italian walrus.

(4) Willow, 11, sang Whip my Hair and is about to star in a remake of Annie. Jaden, 13, took the lead in The Karate Kid remake and raps with Justin Bieber.

(5) Schwimmer is a repeat customer of Cirque du Soleil, particularly its show O. He feels that in the last 15 years, clowning has been taken to another level.

(6) Snaps fingers.

(7) The band previously known as Wicked Wisdom are a metal outfit that opened for Britney Spears in 2004 and played Ozzfest the following year.

THE GUARDIAN