Will Smith and Helen Mirren on exploring love, life and death in Collateral Beauty
Smith portrays a father dealing with the loss of a child in Hollywood tearjerker alongside Mirren, Kate Winslet, Edward Norton and Keira Knightley
There was an unlikely coach on the set of Collateral Beauty, the upcoming tearjerker with an A-list cast that includes Will Smith, Kate Winslet and Helen Mirren. Someone in the wardrobe department working on the film had lost a child and Smith found himself turning to the woman repeatedly to make sure that he was doing justice to his character: a grieving father whose six-year old succumbs to cancer.
“Scene by scene, she would come up and explain what her experiences were,” says Smith. “So it wasn’t difficult to find the emotion, but it was definitely difficult to keep forcing myself into the space to keep it authentic. My habit energy is up.”
The 48-year-old actor, himself a father of three, is the first to concede that the extreme and unimaginable trauma that accompanies the premature death of a child was far from comfortable for him to try and summon up on set.
“A lot of my scenes were by myself, and I didn’t talk a lot in the first half of the film,” says Smith. “I had a lot of quiet time, and for whatever reason that helped me sink deeper into the pain of the loss. It’s a parent’s worst nightmare. You don’t want to imagine it.”
Collateral Beauty, directed by David Frankel (best known for directing The Devil Wears Prada) off a script by Allan Loeb (The Switch, Rock of Ages), is, however, not solely about the death of a child – which in and of itself is a pretty grim way to try to get people into the theatres. While there’s something of a fable-esque and even slightly surreal quality to it, the film is, at its core, a drama that has moments of levity while simultaneously begging the viewer to be profoundly moved.