The Tale of the Filmmaker’s Wife
Jennifer Smith Hits the Big Screen
By Elizabeth Snead
Fashion Wire Daily LA July 10, 2001 – Imagine meeting your favorite filmmaker. He falls head over heels in love with you, marries you at Skywalker Ranch – and even casts you in his latest Miramax movie!
Sounds like a fantasy, right? Well, it’s Jennifer Schwalbach Smith’s reality. The tall, auburn-haired beauty makes her screen debut in husband Kevin Smith’s new film Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, opening Aug 24. Mrs. Smith met the award-winning director of Clerks and Mallrats in ‘98 when she interviewed him in LA for USA Today. And, as the interview ended, their love affair began. “He asked me to stay and hang out with him,” Smith recalls. “Three hours later, we were madly in love.”
A week later, their first “real date” was to the Independent Spirit Awards in Santa Monica, CA, where her new beau received a Best Screenplay award for Chasing Amy. A month later, she quit her job and left LA for a life in Redbank, New Jersey, the site of Kevin’s cult comic store. The couple became engaged and bought two Irish setters, Mulder and Scully.
Smith was shooting Dogma, so their house was filled with stars like Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Chris Rock and Alanis Morrissette. The couple traveled together to Cannes and the Sundance film festivals, and finally married in July ‘99 at Skywalker Ranch. “It was the most wonderful day of my life,” recalls the UCLA political science grad, who grew up in Coral Springs, FL. “I didn’t put much stock in marriage, but for some reason, it changed everything and the relationship got even better than it was.”
The happy couple have a baby daughter, Harley Quinn, 2 (named for a Batman character), who looks so much like her doting dad that she plays him as an infant in the opening scenes of Strikes Back, which also stars Seann William Scott, Mark Hamill, Will Ferrell, Jason Lee, Ben Affleck, George Carlin, Carrie Fisher, and Matt Damon.
Jennifer, 30, plays diamond thief Missy, one of the movie’s “Anti-Charlie’s Angels” crew, which includes Ali Larter, Eliza Dushku and Shannon Elizabeth. Knowing she’d be strutting her stuff onscreen next to these younger babes, the new mom worked out (”like a mad person!”) three hours a day, lifting weights, doing yoga and running with a personal trainer. “I even went to Canyon Ranch,” she confesses.
Her first day on the set, Jennifer was sewn into a skin-tight black catsuit. “It was like a skin-tight nylon sock! It felt like [I was] naked! Plus, I had the worst case of stomach flu in my life, and every time I had to go to the bathroom, they had to rip open the suit and then stitch me back up again!” But the experience, while embarrassing, was liberating. “Where else do you get to wear pony tails and six-inch spike boots, do ninja fighting and shoot a gun?” Smith asks. “It was such fun to play a bad girl and be able to do things and say things I would never say – and make a complete fool out of myself.”
As well as being bad, Smith also produced and co-directed the film’s behind-the-scenes documentary, conducting interviews with the cast and crew. “We got so much great stuff with all the people – like Matt, Ben and Alanis – who are supportive of him, that I’m planning a two-hour documentary for the festival circuit as a special gift for Kevin,” she says. “I don’t think he knows how much all his friends love him.”
