Will Smith in I, Robot Courtesy of 20th Century Fox

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Will Smith and his friends from Philly — the guys who knew him before he moved to L.A. to play the Fresh Prince, before he bulked up to become Jerry Bruckheimer's Bad Boy, before he saved the world from alien apocalypse in back-to-back summer blockbusters, before he played any of his breezy, brash but charming cinematic heroes, roles that slingshotted him into the $20 million-plus-per-picture stratosphere — have a saying: "Who points to the closet?"

Here's the set-up: Some guy with a gun busts into your house while you're there with your friends. It could be that you owe him money and this is the pay-up-sucker moment. Or you've been sleeping with his girl on the sly. Or maybe you haven't done him any dirt and he wants to shoot you anyway because that's just how life goes sometimes. You barely have enough time to slip into the closet unseen when the guy sticks his pistol in your friends' faces, screaming, "Where is he?"

"You don't want to be the dude that points to the closet," Smith says, looking up from his lunch with unblinking almond-shaped eyes that spark green-gold. "But you can't decide in the moment. You have to know who you are before he kicks down the door."

He lets that thought marinate for a moment, eyeballing you with a get-what-I'm-saying? stare that indicated in no uncertain terms that he made up his mind long ago about what he was going to be. It's this blend of self-possession and determination that has made Smith one of the most bankable actors in the world, the rare cinematic force majeure who can consistently open movies domestically (his last three films, Hitch, the animated Shark Tale, and I, Robot, earned more than 40 million each during their first weekend in theaters) as well as translate oversees (those same three films did more than a billion dollars' worth of business worldwide).

"American actors don't realize that you can double and triple your domestic box office with international," says Smith, who targets a new foreign market to focus on when promoting each film, and recently announced that his company, Overbrook, would be producing movies with Indian entertainment company UTV. "They kind of leave it out there for me and Tom [Cruise]."

Sitting in a sycamore-shaded courtyard of an Italian restaurant next to Universal Studios, the actor is making quick work of a plate of crab cakes while roaming around the topics of career, kids, life, love, and religion and how they relate to his new film, The Pursuit of Happyness (more on this funky spelling later), before heading over to the lot to pitch some TV shows with his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. "She's the brains," he says in his warm baritone. "I'm the pitchman, the pretty face who sells it."

Happily married since 1997 and the father of three (two children with Jada and one with his first wife, Sheree), the 38-year-old actor-producer probably doesn't spend much time these days imagining what he'd do if armed aggressors broke down his door (if he does, he should hire some new security people). Like most adults, he's learned that life has much more mundane ways of testing your mettle. Which brings us to Chris Gardner, the real-life man whose story is told in Happyness.