Iana Murray
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.