The 5 Weirdest Tidbits from Will Smith’s Long New York Mag Interview

This week’s New York magazine features an extended interview with Will Smith and his 14-year-old son Jaden, with whom he’s starring in M. Night Shyamalan’s new flick After Earth. What transpired was a surprisingly bizarre session in which the two Smiths came across super-earnest and self-important about their vaguely Scientological New Agey perspective on the world. Here are the five most eyebrow-raising moments of the exchange, broken up into chapters, for your reading pleasure.

Chapter 1: Patterns

Will: I’m a student of patterns. At heart, I’m a physicist. I look at everything in my life as trying to find the single equation, the theory of everything.
Jaden: It’s beyond mathematical. It’s, like, multidimensional mathematical, if you can sort of understand what I’m saying. [Ed: No.]

Chapter 2: Father-Son Relationship

Will: If you were a student of the pattern, you’d have to say we’re going to do another [movie together].
Jaden: I definitely would do another one, absolutely. You know, how Johnny Depp and Tim Burton always do movies together, Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio? We’ll have a relationship like that.

Chapter 3: Bling

Jaden: There was a time in my life when I’d go to Cartier, like, every weekend for like a month.

Chapter 4: Smith Family Expectations (No Pressure)

Will (to Jaden): You can choose anything that you want to do, anything you want to be, and you can decide you want to act crazy and run around. I respect your ability to choose a life for yourself that does not have value to the world. I respect that. I’m just not going have a lot of time for you.

Chapter 5: Patterns II

Will: When you find things that are tried and true for millennia, you can bet that it’s going to happen tomorrow.
Jaden: The sun coming up?
Will: The sun coming up, but even a little more. Like for Best Actor Oscars. Almost 90 percent of the time, it’s mental illness and historical figures, right? So, you can be pretty certain of that if you want to win—as a man; it’s very different for women. The patterns are all over the place, but for whatever reason, it’s really difficult to find the patterns in Best Actress.

Keep looking, guys!

[NY Mag]