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Will Smith is worried.

Yes, Mr. Self-Confidence himself: The movie star who could credibly brag through the late 1990s that he owned the Fourth of July release weekend; the star whose films for more than a decade have almost all earned nine-figure box-office grosses (Independence Day, both Men in Blacks, Enemy of the State, Bad Boys II, Shark Tale, I Robot, Hitch, even – yes – Wild Wild West), or earned him an Oscar nomination (Ali) or both (The Pursuit of Happyness).

The hip-hop star who also claims one of Hollywood's happiest home lives with his wife of 10 years, Jada Pinkett Smith, their acting son and daughter, Jaden and Willow, and his son Trey from a previous marriage. The guy whom everybody seems to at least like, and whom legions of fans love. He's worried that, maybe this time, he's giving them more Will Smith than they can handle.

“I'm in an extremely vulnerable emotional space with this film because it's such a departure,” Smith, buff in a silky white T-shirt and his head shaved almost clean, says of his latest science-fiction spectacular, I Am Legend.

“Like, I know how to give people what they want. I know what people want because I'm that person, I'm a mainstream consumer. But with this film, it's really the first time ever in my career that I've imposed this amount of my artistic desire on the process. There's a level of performance that I wanted to give, a level of authenticity that I wanted to bring to this idea.”

The third film version of Richard Matheson's 1954 novel and the first to use its original title – The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price (1964) and The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston (1971) were the others – Legend features Smith as perhaps the only human survivor of a mutated virus.

His Robert Neville has certainly been the only uninfected person for years in a nature-reclaimed New York, which he prowls by day with a German shepherd before barricading himself against diseased vampires at night.

Which means lots of scenes of Smith just by himself, talking to the dog or not at all. There are abundant scares and action as well, but by Smith's populist way of thinking, this is very avant-garde business indeed.

“We posed the question: Why do the big movies come out in the summer and the good movies come out in the fall?” Smith, 39, explains. “And what we determined is that the framework of a big movie is structured around the delivery of an idea and the so-called ‘good' movies are about people. And what happens is, if you follow the line of a person, you actually break the structure of the idea. So to try to create the small art film in the big blockbuster package is terrifying for me because I so know how to do the other thing. Y'know?

“But I just so want to do something else,” he continues, eschewing the cheerful laughter that accompanies most of his statements. “We had a line we kept saying to ourselves over and over again, though: ‘You don't want to be so smart that you're stupid.' We've seen that happen with movies that are so intellectually and artistically sound that they actually don't work as a movie! So we tried not to be in that space.”

The desire to establish artistic cred alongside popularity goes way back with Smith. Though never considered on the cutting edge of rap, the duo he formed in his native Philadelphia, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, won the first Grammy Award ever bestowed in that category. While his winning personality charmed a big audience for six seasons on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air sitcom, Smith worked his way into movies through such art-house fare as Where the Day Takes You and Six Degrees of Separation.

More recently, Happyness, in which he co-starred with Jaden, sure looked like a cry for critical approval (Willow has a smaller role in Legend). But Smith says he doesn't need awards.

“I measure my success and failure as a performer exclusively at the box office,” he insists. “I feel that people work jobs that they hate, they work with people that they don't like, they drive in traffic that they despise every morning and afternoon. When somebody goes to a movie theatre, or you go to an Imax movie theatre and pay $34 for you and your date, I don't care what anybody says: That is an artist's high-five that is unlike any award you can ever receive.”

If you didn't know I Am Legend is screening in Imax theatres, now you do. Artistic impulses or not, Smith has a dedicated genius for promotion. And let's be serious here: The guy he plays in I Am Legend – a tough, resourceful, highly trained military scientist who may just save the world – is no big departure from the superachievers we associate with Smith.

So what does he really worry about? The same thing that's got him as far as he has come.

“My grandmother thought that I was just the greatest,” he reveals.

“She always had us playing the piano and doing recitations at church and all of that. And there was a look of pride that my grandmother had in her eyes that became, like, the fuel that I need for life. Like, I need my woman and daughter and mother and women in general to look at me with that look – that ‘That's it, Baby!' – that my grandmother had.

“I was about 15 years old when my first girlfriend cheated on me,” he continues. “The way I processed why she cheated on me was that I wasn't good enough, right? So I remember laying in my bed and making a decision that I would never not be good enough again.

“I may have gone a little overboard with it in my mind. But every single day, I can't function if Jada doesn't have that look in her eyes. So that means with my movies, that means as a father, that means as a husband – in everything that I do in my life, I have to educate myself to the place that I can contend as the best on Earth … and that's the only way I can keep my woman from leaving me!”

Will Smith's trademark laugh is heartily back in place – but sounding more nervous now than before.

Special to The Globe and Mail

The faces of Will Smith

Despite the slick, action-packed look of the new sci-fi film I Am Legend, Will Smith says this role is a departure from his more typical action-hero fare. A look at the types of roles that have led him to box-office gold in the past:

The everyman-turned-hero

Men in Black (1997) and Men in Black II (2002)

Bad Boys (1995) and Bad Boys II (2003)

Independence Day (1996)

I, Robot (2004)

Enemy of the State (1998)

The cultural icon

Ali (2001)

The sensitive, troubled soul

Six Degrees of Separation (1993)

The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000)

The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)