Sideshow: That drunken, cussin' Hancock? It's just Dad
Will Smith's family is cool with his antihero character in Hancock, the Philly-born screen star says. Unlike the characters he has played in other summer blockbusters, Hancock is not a 100 percent squeaky-clean role model for the youth of America, or anywhere else. He drinks, swears, mouths off - and goes to prison.
Will Smith
's family is cool with his antihero character in
Hancock
, the Philly-born screen star says. Unlike the characters he has played in other summer blockbusters, Hancock is not a 100 percent squeaky-clean role model for the youth of America, or anywhere else. He drinks, swears, mouths off - and goes to prison.
"Fortunately, our kids are in the business, so they kind of understand," the 39-year-old actor told Associated Press Television News at the red-carpet premiere of the film. "But it is such a bizarre shock for them to see Daddy being mean. It was fantastic in our house."
Smith and his wife,
Jada Pinkett Smith
, have two children. Son
Jaden
costarred with Smith in 2006's
The Pursuit of Happyness
. Daughter
Willow
has a role in the just-released
Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
.
Hancock's in-prison therapy sessions were no problem for the kids, said Pinkett Smith.
"The unfortunate part is that they know all about rehab because of [our] family members, so it wasn't a foreign concept to them," she said. "They totally understand and got it."
Hangin' with Sheriff Andy
Country singer
Brad Paisley
is ecstatic over his Opie moment. Paisley got folksy, fatherly
Andy Griffith
to be in the video for his new single, "Waitin' on a Woman."
"He has influenced my life more than most people that I grew up with - more than most people that I actually knew my whole life," Paisley said recently. "I wrote Andy a letter telling him what he has meant to me over the years and asked him to be in the video."
Griffith, 82, who portrayed dispensers of homespun wisdom on
The Andy Griffith Show
(with
Ron Howard
as Opie) and
Matlock
, plays a kindly codger who tells Paisley's character in the video that waiting for a woman requires patience. The video began airing this week.
"Andy heard the song and wanted to commit to working the long hours necessary to get the video right, and he really adopted this music video as if it was his own," said Paisley, whose past videos have featured
Jason Alexander
,
William Shatner
and
Jerry Springer
.
A whole new zip code
Jason Priestley
, meet Nashville.
The 38-year-old Canadian actor/director says he got a pretty good introduction to the Tennessee city and its music industry while directing a reality series about the Canadian band
the Road Hammers
, the Associated Press reports.
"I got there as an outsider following this band who had a lot of autonomy in Canada and were basically left alone by their record label and did things how they wanted to do them and were successful," the former star of
Beverly Hills, 90210
tells AP. "And here I am following them around in Nashville and they get greeted a lot with 'That's not the way we do it here' or 'Let me tell you how we do it in Nashville.' It was very interesting."
The series
The Road Hammers
premiered last month on the Great American Country channel, where it is being shown Thursday nights.