Will Smith's new film sees him playing a dating doctor who's less assured when it comes to his own love-life, and, he tells Steve Pratt, there are parallels with his first brushes with girls in real life.

A FEMALE journalist from Poland makes the mistake of asking Will Smith how he picks up women. The question is only to be expected as he plays a date doctor in his latest hit movie Hitch. The answer is more of a surprise.

Smith leaves the platform, goes down among the assembled international press corps and sweeps the questioner off her feet and into his arms, literally demonstrating how he picks up a girl.

The sight of one of the film world's most successful leading men making contact with the media, rather than keeping them at arm's length like a smelly sock, is a shock - only less so when that person is Smith.

This is a man who genuinely appears to like interacting with his public. On a previous occasion when discussing a shot of his naked bottom in a movie, he insisted that a female in the front row tweak his bum to ascertain its firmness.

When I Robot was premiered in London last year, he performed a free concert in Leicester Square. For Hitch, he attended three premieres - in Manchester, Birmingham and London - in a single day. Opening a movie is more than strolling down the red carpet.

Back at the interview, he has carefully replaced the Polish women in her chair and turned to the man sitting next to her. "You're jealous, right?," he says, drawing the line at picking him up. Smith does, though, kiss a man for a scene in Hitch. Not in a sexual way, it's just that his on-screen pupil, played by Kevin James, gets a little too enthusiastic and goes all the way, locking lips with Smith.

To add to the embarrassment, the scene was shot in a street in New York in full view of the passing public. "This black guy walks up and he's watching the scene. Then he sees Kevin leaning in for the kiss and he screams, 'brother, no. No, no Will, no man. Don't do that Will. What the hell are you doing, brother?'," recalls the star.

'SO we had security calm him down and explain to him that it was a movie and he was a little more okay with it. But with comedy you can get away with anything and I'm comedically brave, so I was very comfortable."

He was less wlling in 1993, as he began to make the crossover from rap recording star and TV's Fresh Prince of Bel Air with a supporting role in the drama Six Degrees of Separation. Despite playing a gay character, he was advised by another Hollywood star Denzel Washington not to kiss a man on screen.

"At that point in my career I wasn't emotionally stable enough to handle it in a dramatic situation," he admits. "I just think I'm more mature as an actor now. I would never take a role that I wasn't willing to do what it called for in the script."

Smith's openness and honesty is refreshing among Hollywood's A-listers. It's helped him become one of the most bankable movie stars around with a string of hits including Men In Black, Bad Boys, I Robot, Enemy Of The State and Independence Day.

In Hitch, he stars as Alex "Hitch" Hitchens, a legendary New York City date doctor who, for a fee, will help any man find the woman of his dreams. The twist is that when he takes a fancy to a glamorous gossip columnist (played by Eva Mendes), the feeling isn't mutual.

Smith feels that, in real life, love is the ultimate theme - for men as well as women. "It's the highest desire to which we all aspire. We want to find that person that's going to love us no matter how our feet smell, no matter how angry we get, no matter the things we say that we don't mean," he says.

He wasn't always this super-smooth, ultra-cool lurve machine. Goofy, he says, was the word most used by his sisters as a youngster because he was tall and thin. As he started to fill out, he gained more confidence. But it was a difficult time growing up with women because "I was hurt young".

The name of the girl who hurt his feelings remains with him to this day: Stacey Brooks. "I was about ten years old and she promised me the last dance at Sean Haw's birthday party. I was prepared, I was there, I was ready and I turned around and she's on the floor with David Brandon," he says.

Romance with her never really recovered, especially after he was stung by a bee and his face swelled up - as happens to Hitch in the movie. "Stacey saw me like that. Whereas in the movie it was endearing, when you're 11 it freaks the girls out. When they see you like that they want you to get the hell away from them basically."

He has no problem attracting women these days, although he's happily married to actress Jada Pinkett Smith. From the things he says, it's fairly obvious that she's the boss in the relationship.

HE was recently quoted as stating that he and Jada have an open marriage. He denies saying that but doesn't shy away from dealing with the topic. "Fidelity in a marriage is huge. You've got to have that or you've got nothing," he says. "100 per cent unadulterated honesty is the only way that you can ever be truly successful. But don't believe everything you read in the newspapers - and don't believe everything that you write in the newspapers."

Being married to someone in the same business is important, especially when it comes to filming romantic scenes. Jada has done love scenes and understands that it's not like it looks on screen, he says.

"Even if you get a really passionate love scene, the director's saying, 'all right, Will, move your leg, put your leg over her thigh' and you're like, 'seriously, I know how to do this, let me do my thing'. So it's like 50 people sitting around, the grip is eating a hotdog. It's not what it looks like and she understands that.

"And the fact that everything with us is 100 per cent pure honesty. The thing that would make someone jealous or uncomfortable in a relationship is uncertainty, and we remove all the uncertainty."

Smith doesn't think a date doctor could have done anything to smooth the way when he and Jada first got together. Everything went perfectly in their relationship - perfectly wrong.

"Everything that needed to go wrong went wrong very quickly, very early. We learned who we were, who we wanted to be and decided on a path to get there," he explains.

'NORMALLY, in the beginning of relationships it's all the flowers and the butterflies. We didn't have that. I was coming out of a divorce and she was coming out of a bad relationship, and there was no time for bull. It was like blatant, hard, cold honesty. That's the basis of our relationship.

"Everything was a dating disaster in the beginning. On our second date we go to a restaurant and a guy opens the door and goes, 'ah, Mr Smith and Mrs Smith, good to see you'. He was thinking she was my ex.

"And she was like, 'I don't want to eat here'. That was it, our second date about 16 minutes. Just things like that happening, a very tough time for us."

But can Smith really be bright and cheerful 24 hours a day? Surely even this most outgoing of movie stars must have bad days like everyone else.

Hitch director Andy Tennant gives an insight into that side of Smith. The film was made under often difficult circumstances, with constant script re-writes as shooting progressed. Tennant remembers the day they had an argument. Smith, who was also a producer, took him away from the set to speak to him. "He was so pissed he rapped at me for ten minutes. He was yelling at me in verse. I thought it was great."

* Hitch (12A) opens in cinemas on Friday.

Published: 07/03/2005