Is Smith’s family the weirdest family in Hollywood? As Jaden and Willow Smith claim they can control time.

One of Hollywood’s most powerful partnerships, the Men In Black star Will Smith and his actress wife Jada Pinkett Smith, are also considered one of the most preposterously kooky.But this week it emerged that another Hollywood pair may be even more self-inflated, pretentious and just downright strange — their teenage children.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be that surprising. Jaden, 16, and Willow, 14, are home-schooled, which has ensured maximum exposure to their parents.In a joint interview with the New York Times, they insisted that they enjoyed being taught at home — conventional education, they said, is over-rated and depressing. They went on to pontificate about quantum physics, why they prefer to write novels than read them, and their ability to manipulate time itself.

Willow and Jaden Smith

Of course, the Smith children are young and impressionable. But even making allowances for this, their utterings have variously been described as ‘immeasurably bizarre’, beyond parody and ever so slightly terrifying.

They are both stars in their own right, even if some say that their success owes less to talent than to nepotism. Both have been acting since they were seven or eight. Both are singers with new albums to promote — Willow’s debut single went platinum when she was only 12, while Jaden has starred in a string of films, including a remake of The Karate Kid, and also has his own range of clothing.

All very impressive. Just don’t expect them to be able to string a few words together in a vaguely coherent way.

‘I mean, time for me, I can make it go slow or fast, however I please, and that’s how I know it doesn’t exist,’ said Willow. Her brother agreed: ‘On the level of being here on Earth, if you are aware in a moment, one second can last a year.’

To which Willow added cryptically: ‘Because living.’ Jaden seconded that: ‘Right, because you have to live. There’s a theoretical physicist inside all of our minds, and you can talk and talk, but it’s living.’

Welcome to Planet Smith, far weirder and more disturbing than any of the sci-fi films starring their famous father.

After a week in which the social media world has been laughing uproariously at the two unfortunate teenagers, some may feel the Smith family had it coming. They do seem rather short of humility and self-awareness.

Here, for instance, is Jada Pinkett Smith describing the moment an 11-year-old Willow announced she was going to campaign against human trafficking. ‘She was like, “I’ve got to give my voice to this. These young girls out there need me,”’ recalled her mother proudly.

But what do you expect when the ambitious show business couple — who have been married since 1997 — have been propelling their children to stardom from an early age? Smith, still only 46, has been hailed as Hollywood’s most powerful and bankable male star for a decade. His crowd-pleasing films, which include Independence Day, I Am Legend and I, Robot — have taken a staggering $6.6 billion at the box office.

The chirpy, charming son of a school administrator and an electrical engineer who installed supermarket refrigerators, Smith grew up with a ferocious work ethic and little sign of the awful self-importance to come.

The former rapper — who shot to fame in the U.S. sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air — says he vowed to become the world’s biggest star after his girlfriend ditched him when he was 15, because she thought he was a failure.

His success has not bred modesty. He was ridiculed when he said he ‘honestly believed’ he could be U.S. president, and he once told an interviewer: ‘I feel like if I had to take your tonsils out, really, like with no medical training at all, I could.’ Fortunately, he didn’t try.

An actor who studies box office statistics to work out what sort of movies he should be making, Smith applies the same cold logic to his personal life, too. He and his wife have been going to a marriage guidance counsellor several times a week ever since they got married, he says. (Pinkett Smith is the star’s second wife; he has a 22-year-son Trey, a DJ, from a previous marriage.)

‘The maths of it is simple. Start while it’s good,’ he advises. ‘Do it three times a week while you’re laughing and still having fun.’

But there have been recurring rumours that the ‘fun’ had worn off — that the Smiths had an open marriage and were about to separate. Last year, the normally private Pinkett Smith let down her guard on Facebook as she spoke to a friend who was planning to get a divorce.

Sharing her ‘humble thoughts’, Pinkett Smith, 43, admitted she had previously struggled with ‘many addictions’ although she didn’t give details. Addressing her own marriage, she said she had been meeting with ‘our elders’ for the past five years. Could these ‘elders’ have anything to do with the controversial ‘religion’ to which the Smiths have long been linked?

For keen observers of Hollywood say their supreme egotism and oddity can be explained by a single word — Scientology.

Will and Jada, who live on a 27,000 sq ft ranch near Malibu, California, were introduced to Scientology in 2004 by Tom Cruise, a close friend (as are the Beckhams). Cruise is an outspoken advocate of the ‘church’ — regarded by many as an insidious cult — and the Smiths have donated generously to the organisation, including more than $122,000 in 2007.

But Cruise’s links with the church damaged his career and the Smiths insist they are not members. Instead, Will — who was once reported to have dabbled with Islam while playing Muhammad Ali in a film biopic — says they are ‘students of world religion’.

Still, he and his family tend to spout Scientology’s pseudo-scientific claptrap almost every time they open their mouths.

Even some of Smith’s films — notably last year’s disastrous sci-fi epic After Earth, which he made as a vanity project for Jaden — have been accused of being thinly-veiled Scientology propaganda.

Most controversially, the Smiths spent $1.2 million in 2008 to set up the New Village Leadership Academy in Los Angeles. The Smiths, who claimed to have designed the curriculum, faced allegations that the school was focused on Scientology. They, however, insisted the new primary school would be secular.

Both Jaden and Willow attended, but the school closed last year when most of the parents removed their children.

The project’s failure may explain why the Smith children are so antagonistic towards schools.

Last year, Jaden tweeted to his 4.5 million followers that ‘If everybody in the world dropped out of school, we would have a much more intelligent society’.

Mischievous souls might suggest he and his sister are not the best advert for home-schooling.

Asked in their latest interview what they were reading, Jaden said ‘The Ancient Secret Of The Flower of Life’ and ‘ancient texts — things can’t be predated’. His sister said she was reading about quantum physics and Osho, a disgraced Indian ‘sex guru’ who collected Rolls Royces and espoused sexual liberation.

Jaden then revealed his ambition to be ‘the most craziest person all the time’, while Willow expressed ‘the feeling of being like, this is a fragment of a holographic reality that a higher consciousness made’.

Modest souls both, Jaden said he would ‘imprint myself on everything in this world’, while Willow said there were no novels she wanted to read, so ‘I write my own novels and then I read them again, and it’s the best thing’.

Certainly, it is hard not to feel some sympathy for the young Smiths. In last year’s futuristic After Earth, Jaden played a boy trying to live up to his military hero father, played by his real dad.

It was art imitating reality, said Smith Senior: ‘Your father’s the biggest movie star in the world and you’re struggling for your little piece of dignity in this extreme shadow.’ Critics said Jaden was desperately out of his depth in the role.

Not that the Smiths would acknowledge anything might be amiss. When Will and Jaden were interviewed by a New York magazine, the pair gave a master class in portentous unintelligibility, as they earnestly discussed how there was a ‘special equation for everything’, if only we could discover a new form of ‘multi-dimensional’ mathematics that was ‘beyond’ mathematics.

Will Smith also told the interviewer it would be ‘absolutely insane’ to suggest he and his wife had pushed their kids into showbusiness.

Perhaps. But he and his wife seem to have lured them into the outer reaches of nonsense-spouting, Hollywood eccentricity.

photo credit: Uk Daily Mail.