The Crush: Willow and Jaden Smith

Crush was a pretentious teen once, too, so when we heard the spawn of Will and Jada Smith talk about duality, Prana energy and how there’s a theoretical physicist inside all our minds, as they did in an interview with The New York Times recently, we remembered carrying around a copy of Sartre’s Existentialism and Humanism and misquoting Nietzsche at their age and we just wanted to give Willow, 14, and Jaden, 16, a big hug. They are trying so hard and Crush totally respects that: as Nietzsche would say… nope, sorry, we’ve forgotten.

One person whose utterances we will now remember forever, however, is Willow, who has morphed from a cute kid singing about her hair to the kind of human being who just gets the world better than you do: ‘There’re no novels that I like to read so I write my own novels and then I read them,’ she says. And what of Jaden, already an established actor, having starred in The Karate Kid, and a young man who aspires to be ‘the most durable person on the planet’, despite or maybe because of his friendship with Justin Bieber?

Well, one has to admire anyone unironically reading The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life. Once Crush turned 18, we realised we’d better shut the hell up about Sartre before we really found out what alienation meant. And this, people, is why we so celebrate the cerebral, self-conscious Smith kids who, in Hollywood, will never be told to put a lid on it.