Pressure: Interview

Review by By Clint Morris

Interview with Kerr Smith
Actor from Dawson's Creek and new Pressure film.

Imagine this: You're shopping in Victoria's Secret - as you do - and get talking to the cashier about a show called Dawson's Creek. Then your agent pages you. You ask the cashier to call the agent from the store telephone, and on the other end of the line she tells you you've just got a role on Dawson's Creek. How surreal is that?

Surreal or not, the staff of Victoria's Secret suddenly realized they had a star in the making on the shop floor. His name is Kerr Smith. Wearing his Calvin Klein underwear, Clint Morris investigates...

Kerr Smith: superstar in the making

Smith, whose first name was bequeathed to him by his grandmother, who carried it as her maiden name, swapped an Emmy-Award winning part on CBS's As The Day Turns for the role of a troubled gay teenager on Kevin Williamson's hit series Dawson's Creek.

"Life has changed since joining Dawson's. Your working every day, you loose a lot of your privacy, and you have some extra change in your pocket. Basically, your life goes from 0-60 in a few short months," says Smith. "I now get noticed in the streets. Without the fans, I wouldn't have a job."

Smith is becoming even more aware that Dawson's Creek won't last forever. "It's not my job to determine when it will end, but if I had to guess I would say one more year after this one," he says.

But with a few film roles already up his sleeve, including Final Destination, The Forsaken and the upcoming Pressure, Smith's got credentials on his side. "In general it's easier to get jobs as young TV star because there are many young roles out there with not many young actors. For me though, it's harder... because I'm going out for main stream films instead of the teenage genre films," he explains.

Part of the reason could be that some of these teen-films, including The Forsaken, which Smith starred in, are'nt faring too well at the box office. "I thought The Forsaken was an interestingly edgy film. I enjoyed making the picture, and I thought it should of done better than it did. Sony was happy though, it made money," recalls Smith.

"I play Jack 8 months of the year, anything else I do is going to differ from Jack... I can guarantee that," says Smith, who has just wrapped a film called Pressure from Director Richard Gale.

"I've never met a guy who could recite an entire film verbatim. Richard did just that. We were at my house and we put in a tape of Pressure, to only find out that the audio had not been transferred properly. Richard did the audio for us.

"Ninety minutes later he was done... unbelievable. That shows how well he knows this film and how much of himself he put into it," says Kerr.

"Right now its floating around the Festival circuit. I'd like to see it come out this summer though," says Smith. "I have another film already completed. It's called Ground Zero. It has nothing to do with 9/11; it was actually made before that happened. It's a film about nuclear weapons and terrorism that NBC will hopefully air this summer."

One role Smith wanted, but missed out on, was that of Peter Parker/Spiderman in Sony's Spiderman - but he's already chasing another superhero part. "The Green Lantern!" he declares. "We should make a film about this guy. He could kick any other super hero's ass!"

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