Rosario Dawson's calming effect on Will Smith

So you think being the world’s biggest movie star and certified hunk make for the world’s greatest lover? Not if you ask gorgeous Latina Rosario Dawson.

The beautiful actress let out a huge and giggly laugh when asked about her intimate love scenes with Will Smith. “That was something Will was trying to avoid all the way through the end. Will is surprisingly very, very shy,” Rosario tells this writer during the Beverly Hills junket in early December for the upcoming Columbia Pictures’ heart-rending and powerful drama Seven Pounds.

She is speaking of Will Smith, of course — yes, the Will Smith, the global megastar whose collective worldwide box office take of his 2008 movies (I Am Legend and Hancock) topped $1-B — the only actor in history to ever do so in a single year!

In what would surprise Will’s female fans, the actress reveals how manly-man Will turned coy and quite reserved the moment production shifted to their intimate and pivotal love scenes in the movie.

 “He was very nervous while going through the whole scene and talking about how happy we were all there and getting to do some work and suddenly he just got really small and he said like ‘Hmm, so when you are thinking about buff… am not really sure’, and then suddenly I was like, ‘Wait, you have only done these in Six Degrees of Separation (years ago) and Ali with your wife’ so this is… I was literally popping his cherry!”

And so pop the cherry she does!

During rehearsals, Will was “was gentle and he was shaking in my arms. He was very, very sweet and was very much cautious. I remember Tom Cruise walked in (Tom is one of Will’s closest buddies and his son Connor Cruise makes his Hollywood debut as the younger Will Smith in the movie) and he was like ‘I always have sex scenes in all my movies’ and Will was like ‘Yeah, this is so great. I just don’t wanna be that guy with my hands still on her thighs when the director says cut. Do I throw something on you in between scenes?’”

“It was an ongoing conversation I have to say. And he kept pushing it towards the end of the schedule so much to the point that I started feeling a little bit crazy about my breath and I was like ‘Dude, I just brushed today it’s not gonna be that bad, I swear.’ But he just said we’d have to move it until the end of the schedule, and I was like ‘Can he do that?’”

Will is among a select few Hollywood celebrities who produces their own movies; hence, has creative and financial control over how their films are made.

Rosario continues that on the day they are finally shooting the love scene, she and Will were huddled in a corner discussing how they would go about the initial kiss when Will heard her stomach suddenly grumble.

“He was like ‘Are you hungry?’, and I am like, ‘Yeah, but I don’t want to eat because am craving tuna fish and I already brushed my teeth and gargled and am ready for the kiss and I don’t wanna be that girl who chomped on a tuna fish sandwich before kissing Will Smith, and he was like, “No, no, thank you for thinking of me like that but you should see Eva (Mendez, who co-starred and shared a screen kiss with Will in the movie Hitch) who had tuna fish sandwich with chips on it literally just before our kiss!’”

And so they finally kissed.

And the love scenes were shot next.

Did she do anything extra to make Will less nervous?

“A lot of things,” she replies with a bit of naughtiness.

It helped that Jada (Pinkett Smith, Will’s real-life wife and an A-list actress herself) was in the room when they shot the intimate scenes. “Jada was so open about it. She was the one who was telling him, ‘Listen, you better bring it, do not embarrass me. I do not want to see you on screen with my friends and they go, Oh, he ain’t got no rhythm’ she’s like, ‘Do that thing I like whatever it is, show it on screen, don’t let me see you like you are dialing it in’, so she was on my side with it.”

The love scene took a couple of takes to complete. “The first take was so funny I keep making fun of him about it,’ she says. “We were supposed to be undressing each other and doing the whole thing and he lay down and I keep trying to get him not to be sort of not on top and he was like literally, ‘oh, take me’ and the very first take we have is with Will on the bottom. We did not expect that to happen, we didn’t think that we needed to have to talk about it and it seems that everyone in the room was on the same page except for Will.”

To be “in bed with Will”, the smart and witty actress had to contend with several other stars anxious to get in a part with the actor. “This was one of the best scripts that I’ve read, period,” she says. “As soon as I read it, I knew that this was a character I loved; this was a journey I wanted to take.”

Seven Pounds tells the mysterious story of Ben Thomas (Will), an IRS agent who sets out to find seven strangers with plans to bestow on them a gift that would change their lives forever until he meets Emily Posa (Rosario). Audiences will discover a totally different Will Smith in the movie.

It is “ultimately not only about a man and a woman who find each other at a moment of crisis for both of them but a love story between a man and humanity,” is how Will sums it up.

Rosario, who appeared as Mimi in the movie adaptation of the Broadway musical Rent and most recently co-starred with Shia LeBouf in last summer’s hit Eagle Eye had to go through several auditions before finally landing the part.

She admits she is a huge fan of Will. “Will is really honestly just an amazing man. My mom visited me on the set and he is so great with everybody. You know, there are very few people I think, unfortunately, that you can meet in this industry and actually be happy about meeting and walk out of it going, ‘I love supporting you, I wanna watch all your movies. Whatever it is that you are doing, I wanna be there to support you’, because sometimes you meet people in this industry and it just — it hurts, you’re just going, ‘You know what? I can’t ever watch you in a movie again because you are such a jerk.’”

Seven Pounds opens Feb. 4 in theaters.