Jodie Turner-Smith is wearing an oversized jumper and jeans, hiding her face under a voluminous faux fur hat, when we meet for dinner in early September. We’re at Zafferano, a high-end Italian restaurant in London’s Knightsbridge, which Jodie frequents regularly. She has a favourite wine – a dry Sardinian red – and takes her lobster linguine with a pot of chilli flakes ready on the side. Every so often, waiters will stop by for a friendly catch-up. One of them will later gift us a shot of Frangelico, the hazelnut liqueur, because he knows that she doesn’t like the taste of limoncello. “Oh my god, you brought me my liquid dessert!” she yells, delighted.
We’re meeting over linguine and Frangelico to discuss Jodie’s GLAMOUR Women of the Year award for ‘Screen Trailblazer’, a recognition of the game-changing performances that have contributed to her rapid ascent. There’s an ethereal quality to Jodie; both in the woman sitting in front of me – she feels at one with the celestial, collecting crystals and attributing her tidiness to her birth chart – and also in the characters she plays. She has made a name for herself as a mesmeric star, playing doomed monarchs (Anne Boleyn), leaders of planetary organisations (The Acolyte), and women who dabble in the supernatural (Bad Monkey). When her character meets Daniel Kaluuya’s in Queen & Slim – her first leading role back in 2019 – she’s dressed head-to-toe in angelic white; one of her earliest film credits was ’Statuesque Woman’ in the 2017 indie drama Newness; and in Sex Education, she appears in Ncuti Gatwa’s dreams, shining in heavenly light as God herself.
“I’m here for it,” she says of her past roles, proudly. “It’s giving authentic casting.” It’s no wonder that she’s been awarded ‘Screen Trailblazer’. Who else can say they were God?
Our dinner balloons to close to three hours, but it doesn’t take nearly as long to feel comfortable with one another. We find common ground almost immediately, in our shared love of Apple TV+ series Pachinko, and an unabashed crush on actor Steve Sanghyun Noh, who plays the lead’s chiselled husband. “Honestly, I think I love him,” she says, before quickly correcting herself, “I’m actually not dating, I’m over men.” (More on this later.) Indeed, our meeting is forever immortalised when Jodie starts searching on her phone and finds a cardboard cutout of Steve online.
“I’m gonna send you one of these cardboard cutouts, swear down,” she tells me.
Are you serious?
“What is your address?” she replies, deeply serious. (A few days later, true to her word, the life-sized, six-foot-tall cutout of Steve Sanghyun Noh arrives on my doorstep. It currently looks out of my living room window, scaring passersby.)
The day after our meeting happens to be Jodie’s 38th birthday. She’s woefully unprepared, as she is every year (her words, not mine), deciding at the last minute to host a party at Chiltern Firehouse. Earlier today, she fired off an Instagram story asking friends to DM her for details – like someone who doesn’t have more than half a million followers would do.
She's in London filming The Agency, an English-language remake of the French espionage series, Le Bureau des Légendes, and has already banked another two films: the new Tron instalment with Greta Lee; and A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, alongside Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell. In tandem with her ascendency onscreen, Jodie has become a bona fide style icon, fronting campaigns for Gucci, becoming a mainstay on the front rows of major fashion shows and even hosting the British Fashion Awards in 2022.
Everything Jodie does comes from a desire to represent honestly. In Bad Monkey – Apple TV+’s crime comedy released in August this year, in which Jodie plays a woman who resists the colonisers of her home in the Bahamas – she was able to decide her character Dragon Queen’s look, down to the gold teeth and manicured nails. In doing so, she was able to earnestly honour Obeah, the African diasporic spell-casting tradition that her character specialises in. “Obeah has a bad rap, because colonialism demonised it,” she explains. “Anything that exists outside of the status quo is a threat, because it’s an opportunity for free thinking. How can you control people if you don’t understand what it is?”
Evidently, Jodie has a lot keeping her occupied, not in the least her phone, which vibrates on the table every few minutes from friends sending their birthday RSVPs. But the one person she really wants to hear from is Juno, her four-year-old daughter with ex-husband Joshua Jackson. This week, Jodie had taken advantage of a small gap in her filming schedule to spend two days at home with Juno in LA, touching down in London to head straight back to The Agency set and then on to our dinner.
School is keeping Juno across the Atlantic, and the distance between them has never felt more enormous: until now, the two hadn’t been apart for more than five days. “This is going to be the thing I look back on and think, ‘Wow, I survived that,’” she says. “This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”
A statue of Juno’s namesake – Juno Sospita, the Roman goddess and divine protector – sits in the Vatican, holding aloft a spear as if perennially ready to fire. “She’s very strong, and she’s so fiery,” Jodie says of her daughter, turning her phone to show me a photo of her by the Spanish Steps from a recent Roman holiday. That strength seems to be inherited directly; it took four days for Jodie to give birth. “She comes from a long line of warrior women,” Jodie adds. “Me, on the other hand? This is testing my warriorhood!”
Another prolonged buzz cuts through the conversation; Jodie’s mother is on the line, calling from Florida. “It’s very late for her to be calling me,” she says, realising a second later that it’s her birthday in a few hours. “I love you,” she says into the phone. “Thank you for having me.”
“I’m so lucky to have her,” Jodie says after hanging up. “She lived with us for three years when I was with my husband, and just made it possible for me to do everything that I’m doing.” Jodie and her mother went through a boomerang phase, drifting apart before finding each other again. “We were very close when I was young and then, as everyone does, I tried to individuate from her.” Becoming a mother herself, she adds, brought them closer than ever: “It’s literally the most crazy, beautiful, thankless, emotional job in the whole wide world.”
Born in September 1986, Jodie grew up in Coates, a quiet village half an hour from Peterborough. It has “countryside vibes”, as she puts it (the town was the backdrop for the war scenes in Atonement.) After her parents divorced, 10-year-old Jodie, her mum and two of her siblings uprooted and moved to Gaithersburg, Maryland, in the US.
“I remember being very excited about moving to America because, obviously, there would be Black people everywhere,” Jodie remembers – growing up in the overwhelmingly white village of Coates, the only Black people she knew were in her immediate family. “I would get more racial comments and issues [directed at me] from people. When I moved to America, I felt like it was more of a conversation with people that were Black. I didn’t fully understand the hierarchy of Blackness in an overt way until I moved to America.
“When I actually got to be around Black people, then I began to really understand, in a clearer way, the nuances of colourism,” Jodie continues. “Colourism is a problem in communities of colour around the world. There’s a reason why skin bleaching is a big deal in India, in Jamaica, in Korea.” Words and conversations that she’d encountered growing up suddenly took on a whole new meaning. “Somebody telling me not to go out and play in the sun for too long – that would seem so innocuous, but later I realised this is actually really harmful. They’re all conditioning. Everyone’s just trying to overcome their conditioning.”
To be famous is to give the illusion of easy success, but Jodie confesses that she’s still aiming for the simple things. For one, “I don’t have a house,” she says, alluding to the fact she rents her house in LA. “When I have my house, then I’m going to achieve another level of success.” But it’s the privileges of success that she strives for more than anything. “Success grants freedom,” she explains. “It grants you the ability to choose differently. I want to be able to look after my family in perpetuity. I want to have enough passive income that I can work a little bit less. I want to not be in the middle of a divorce. That will be a success, too.”
You might know the story. Jodie married Joshua Jackson, of Dawson’s Creek fame, in late 2019, immediately achieving ’It’ couple red-carpet notoriety. Admittedly, she leaned into it on Instagram, posting pictures of the two of them regularly. (“I’m a millennial, so I grew up posting my whole life,” she reasons.) Now, she’s negotiating which parts of herself she chooses to share, knowing how eagerly her personal life has been consumed and claimed. “Just because I make movies or TV shows, or I married a person that people love, doesn’t mean that everybody else gets to own me,” she says. Since Jodie filed for divorce in October last year, citing ’irreconcilable differences’, co-parenting has been a process she’s still smoothing out. “It’s an adjustment period for anyone when they split up with someone, because you’re used to being with your child all the time,” she continues. “But nobody hands you a manual. Everyone’s trying to figure it out. Each parent has a different life, and especially if the reason why you’re splitting up is because you have different lives, it’s only further complicated by how you’re going to coparent.”
Just two months after the couple separated, Jackson was spotted in Joshua Tree, California, holding hands with actor Lupita Nyong’o, with whom he is now in a relationship (although they haven't been seen together since June). “He can do whatever he wants,” Jodie responds diplomatically when I ask about his relationship with Lupita. “Just be good to Juno and be good to Juno’s mum, because I’m going to be Juno’s mum forever,” she says, in a moment of vulnerability. And then, as though to signal the end of this line of questioning: “It’s really not for me to have an opinion on his journey.”
There are some parts of Jodie Turner-Smith, however, that she does want the world to be privy to. In June, alongside a selfie photo dump in which she is bathed in light and glitter, Jodie posted an excerpt from self-help author SARK’s Succulent Wild Woman on Instagram. The list features tips such as “practise extravagant lounging” and “describe yourself as marvellous”, resonating with Jodie’s fondness for self-care. (She will spend the day after her birthday “steaming out my sins and getting beat with the f*cking leaves” with a group of friends at traditional Russian spa Banya in London). In the post, Jodie highlights one point in particular with three exclamation marks – “marry yourself first. promise to never leave you(!!!)”
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Another tip from Jodie, regardless of your relationship status: “Get your money right, because at the end of the day, it allows you the independence that you need to not be controlled. Independence is not free. It costs money, and money is power,” she explains.
Power was something Jodie found in Star Wars series The Acolyte, released over the summer and set a century before Luke Skywalker and Rey picked up their lightsabers. The show’s director, Kogonada, offered her the role following a conversation they had at the Cannes premiere of After Yang, a sci-fi drama the pair worked on together pre-pandemic. Jodie had given birth to her daughter the year prior in April 2020, and shared her regrets that she wasn’t able to bring her knowledge as a new mother to the role. The conversation led to an opportunity in a galaxy far, far away – indeed, she had never starred in anything of that scale. In the show, Jodie appears in flashbacks as Mother Aniseya, the leader of a matriarchal coven of space witches, naturally.
When Jodie met The Acolyte co-star Amandla Stenberg, who does double duty as the lead, playing both of Aniseya’s twin daughters, Amandla gave her an essay she had penned on her approach to the characters – their motivations, their inner lives. It was a gift. “I’ve never worked with anybody who’s handed me an essay on their character. The Virgo in me was just like, ‘Yass, I’m living for this!’” she says, before revealing why that joy was short-lived. “She put so much care and thought and love into that, and it’s disappointing to feel like your studio is not having your back in a very public-facing way,” she adds, alluding to how she felt Disney didn't support Amandla at the time.
The show was unceremoniously cancelled, allegedly due to low ratings – but in the weeks leading up to its season finale, the cast faced relentless torrents of racist abuse online from so-called fans who couldn’t handle a Black actor leading a Star Wars series. In a video posted to her Instagram story, Amandla addressed the cancellation, noting that since the show was announced in 2020, she and the cast have experienced a “rampage of hyper-conservative bigotry, vitriol, prejudiced hatred and hateful language”. It’s an infuriating cycle: actors of colour are cast in Star Wars projects and are immediately made vulnerable to vicious bigotry. (John Boyega in particular has been outspoken about his experience with racism while part of the Star Wars sequel trilogy.)
“They’ve got to stop doing this thing where they don’t say anything when people are getting fucking dog-piled on the internet with racism and bullshit,” Jodie says of Disney’s lack of response to The Acolyte’s reception. “It’s just not fair to not say anything. It’s really unfair.”
“It would just be nice if the people that have all the money” – whether that be Disney or any studio – “were showing their support and putting their feet down,” she proposes. “Say this is unacceptable: ‘You’re not a fan if you do this.’ Make a really big statement and just see if any money leaves. I bet you it won’t, because people of colour, and especially Black people, make up a very large percentage of buying power. They might find that it’s actually more lucrative for them, but everyone’s using ‘woke’ like it’s a dirty word.”
She’s hopeful that the tide will shift one day: “Opinions change. What’s in vogue changes. We’re gonna get there at some point, to that place where people stop having a stick up their arse about people of colour being a part of IPs that were created by white people. You know why?” she asks. “Because we’re never going to fucking stop participating.”
When people can’t envision sci-fi outside of an antiquated vision of the genre, being a person of colour in the public eye is unforgiving. Actors like Jodie are attacked just for existing, and when ratings aren’t as explosive as hoped, it seems that the blame falls on them. “We don’t get to fail upwards like a lot of white men,” she says. “I just feel that some people are allowed to grow and others have to be perfect, and if they’re not perfect – even when it’s great – people want to fucking tear it apart.”
This wasn’t Jodie’s first encounter with the ruthlessness of online bigotry. Her turn as Henry VIII’s second wife in the 2021 Channel 5 mini-series Anne Boleyn became fodder for comment sections across the internet, with some enraged that a Black woman could and would play historical royalty – before anyone had even seen a second of footage. (Once the series was out in the world, despite positive reviews calling the series “a showcase of Jodie Turner-Smith’s resilience as a performer”, the show was still mercilessly review-bombed on community sites.) But Jodie remembers the series differently. There was the constant fear and anxiety, the uncertainty in herself. She had only given birth to Juno months before the winter shoot in Yorkshire. “You have to understand – after you have a baby, so much of you is different,” she explains. “There’s so much telling you that you can’t do anything anymore. Being a woman is so hard. And if they can, they’ll take everything from you. Just know that you’re capable, no matter what.”
It was the first time that Jodie was first on the call sheet, and shouldering the pressure of being the lead was only compounded by her responsibilities as a new mother. The schedule of the show’s six-week production was relentless. She was on set from first light, then up all night by her daughter’s side.
“I was breastfeeding her every three hours, and then [Juno] got sick, getting these respiratory infections,” Jodie recalls, her voice shaking at the memory. “We were shooting in these cold, damp castles, and I was in fucking back rooms pumping. My daughter started getting used to the bottle. She was refusing my breast on the weekends. I was devastated the whole time, thinking my milk was drying up.”
Interviews like this can often feel circular, but this has been a rare, life-affirming conversation. Such is the effect of Jodie’s resilience; she has taken whatever life has thrown at her, hammered away at it, and turned it into armour. A woman truly, to use her own words, descended from warriors.
“I got this,” she says. “I got this because the only thing I know how to do is not break. I don’t know what the path to success looks like, but I know that I will not, I shall not, I cannot break.”
As Jodie and I prepare to leave, our conversation briefly turns to the art of manifestation. “I said I wanted a brilliant, intelligent, sassy daughter, and here she is,” she says of Juno, beaming. “When I met my husband, I told him that I wanted to be a movie star, and three months later I got Queen & Slim.” No one but Jodie Turner-Smith writes her future. All it takes is hard work, dedication and just a little bit of magic – and I, for one, can’t wait to see what Jodie wills into existence next.
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