Jodie Turner-Smith Takes Control

Originally, Jodie Turner-Smith was supposed to attend the Met Gala with a man on her arm. In her red-carpet fantasy, she and Burberry designer Daniel Lee were to be the figurative bride and groom, she dressed in a bright white dress with a plunging neckline and 150,000 hand-stitched crystal pearls, and he in a chest-baring tuxedo jacket: the start of a beautiful brand relationship. But the dress was running late, so she arrived like Cinderella, stag to the ball. Afterward on Instagram, she posted photos saying the event was significant as “my first stepping out on my own” with the white symbolizing “rebirth” and “a clean start,” adding, “In nature, death is both an ending *and* a beginning.” The initial sketches of the dress had been a little too sheer, a little too reminiscent of her first Met Gala look in 2022 when she was a brand ambassador for Gucci and wore a kind of naked, metal bralette alongside her husband, Joshua Jackson. Since then, her contract with Gucci had ended and she had filed for divorce from Jackson citing irreconcilable differences. “I’ve been joking, ’I lost both my husbands this year,’” she says.

We’re drinking Sancerre and eating fried eggs at the Chateau Marmont, the longtime celebrity habitat. She used to work the host stand at Bar Marmont after she had moved to the city at 22. “I was doing more modeling, and I just kept calling off work,” she says. “The manager, amazing guy, was like, ’You know I got to fire you, right, girl?’” She lets out a big, warm laugh. She tells me she was running late because she was saying hi to her old coworkers. Now she’s on the other side wearing an official Cowboy Carter T-shirt, wide-legged black jeans, Dr. Martens, and a black Birkin: casual but a flex. (Yes, Beyoncé sent her the shirt.)

The location was a last-minute change so she could check in on her mother and her 4-year-old daughter, Juno, who are around the corner at a nearby friend’s house, where she’s staying at the moment. After filing for divorce in September, she has been bopping from place to place. Last year, she moved out of Jackson’s childhood home in Topanga Canyon, which she describes as “a very beautiful gilded cage.” She finished shooting the director Kogonada’s next feature, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, starring Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie, and has been doing the press rounds for The Acolyte, Leslye Headland’s Star Wars show in which she plays Mother Aniseya, the leader of a powerful witch coven that very much gives lesbian separatists in a galaxy far, far away. She’ll look for her own place in L.A. as soon as she gets back from London where she’s shooting a yet-to-be-announced show. “I don’t have the luxury of turning down a job because of location,” she says. “I am a single mom now. ’I got a baby. I need some money. I need cheese for my egg,’ as Ms. Cardi B says.”

For as long as she has been famous, her identity has been tied to Jackson’s. We can zero in on November 14, 2019, the premiere of Queen & Slim at AFI Fest as the moment when nothing would ever be the same. The film was her first leading role. She was 20 weeks pregnant at the time — the baby bump hidden under a lilac Gucci dress with an empire waist — and had just gotten married to Jackson a few months prior. So when he asked if they could take a photo together, she thought, How sweet, how romantic. Her man wanted to claim her. There had been some paparazzi shots of the pair out and about, but this made them red-carpet official. Her star turn in the public consciousness also became the moment she became known as Mrs. Joshua Jackson.

“It all came from a really innocent place,” she says. “I didn’t understand how sinister that could end up being for me. It was taking away from a moment that I needed to have on my own. It opened up a very painful conversation to the world about who I was with and how right or wrong it was to be with that person. And when you’re pregnant, it’s like the most vulnerable time of your life.”

At 37, Turner-Smith grew up squarely in the time when sharing your life online was the norm. She’s caught between her own natural inclination to tell it as it is and the understanding of how that can upend her personal life — all of which makes our conversation a game of reading between the lines. She has learned from experience that the public’s desire to know is insatiable. So she speaks in the rosy, evasive tones of love and light, personal truth and happiness. Her divorce from Jackson was a result of their going on “different paths.” Two months after Turner-Smith filed for divorce, Jackson began visibly dating another actor, Lupita Nyong’o. Is that weird? “Good for them,” she replies. “We need happiness in order to peacefully co-parent. I’m trying to get us to the Gwyneth and Chris Martin level. I truly hope they’re happy and that it benefits us as a family.”

Turner-Smith is an immigrant by way of immigrants. Her parents are from Jamaica and moved to Peterborough, a cathedral city north of London. They divorced, and when she was 10 years old, she moved to Gaithersburg, Maryland, with her mother and two of her siblings. She liked books and poetry; “If she didn’t like the environment, she found herself a book and sat in a corner,” says her mother, Hilda Turner-Smith. The possibility of a creative life wasn’t imaginable, so she studied finance at the University of Pittsburgh and worked at a bank afterward. It was jarring to encounter people who actually liked what they did. In 2009, she met Pharrell Williams backstage at a N.E.R.D. concert, and he told her she should be in front of the camera. She had done some test shots in college and nothing came of it, but if Pharrell saw something in her, she thought, then maybe she should believe it. She left for L.A. the next month.

On arrival, she starred in The-Dream’s music video “Walkin’ on the Moon” standing next to Kanye West. She booked a Levi’s campaign. She worked steadily for years, mostly on the commercial side. Modeling was a limited form of acting to her, a way to portray a character and interior world. She kept a blog and wrote poetry on the side, including a Tumblr called Miss Jodie that has been largely inactive since 2018. Mostly it’s an artifact of her life as a working model and actor — bits of history, art, poetry, fashion photography — but there’s a spate of love poems she wrote around the end of 2017. “I don’t know whether to be cringing or excited,” she says when I show her one. It begins:

we don’t love each other in that way

right? 

that is our story

we stick to it

until we are sticking to each other

once in a fortnight

When I ask if any specific person inspired them, she gives the writerly answer that they are “an amalgamation.” “I used to write prose poetry about what was going on in my heart. That was my favorite part of myself,” she says. “Maybe I left it there, because I would love to find that person again. I just have to dig her out of over a decade of rust.”

She eventually pursued acting full-time, which started with a four-episode appearance as a Siren on True Blood. She gradually picked up little gigs: a one-liner in Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon, a satire about the modeling industry starring Elle Fanning in which she plays the assistant to Christina Hendricks’s character; a credit as “statuesque woman” in Newness. A number of TV shows came and went without fanfare, like the action series The Last Ship, the crime drama Jett, and a sci-fi horror show called Nightflyers based on George R.R. Martin’s novella. The cancellation of the last one, in which she played Melantha, a human who was genetically enhanced for space travel, stung in particular. She had met with Martin and visited him in Santa Fe. She had originally signed on to it because of Mike Cahill, who directed the movies Another Earth and I Origins. She said they shot the pilot with him but then reworked it with someone else. “I wish I could have seen the Mike Cahill version of the show, because I felt really good that something special could have been there,” she says.

In 2018, she met Jackson at a charity event at the Ace Hotel in L.A. She had braids down to her ankles and was wearing a “The future is female ejaculation” T-shirt, which Tessa Thompson’s character wears in Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You. Jackson yelled “Detroit!” — the character’s name — at her across the room. She joked to Seth Meyers it was a one-night stand turned “two, three-year one-night stand.” They moved quickly. Within the year, they were married and having a baby. They had a 12-person surprise wedding, which they told their family was going to be an early screening of Queen & Slim, in her manager’s backyard. Instead, they said “I do” and played audio of their daughter’s heartbeat at the end of the ceremony. “It was deeply romantic and very dramatic because we’re both actors and we live for drama,” she says. In April 2020, at the start of lockdown, she gave birth to their daughter, Juno, in a home birth that was nearly four days long. They rented a house in West Hollywood so they could be near a hospital in case something went wrong. She had prodromal contractions for three days, and they were irregular and all over the place — one minute, four minutes, ten minutes. Still, she was determined to have a natural birth. She didn’t want to go to the hospital. Her midwife and doula suggested she take castor oil to help move things along. “Fourteen hours later, I gave birth,” she says smiling. “Because one thing about me, if I want something, I’m going to get it.”

Queen & Slim was the breakthrough moment of her professional career. When Turner-Smith first saw it,her reaction was “Best Picture!” She played Angela Johnson, the Queen to Daniel Kaluuya’s Slim; the two go on the run after killing a cop in self-defense during a lackluster first date. While initial reviews were positive, later critiques were more mixed, including one by Angelica Jade Bastién in Vulture. “It’s Turner-Smith who truly captured my attention in the film with her lupine grace and magnetic presence,” she writes. “Unfortunately, she isn’t served well by a script brimming with clunky dialogue and a poorly sketched backstory.” The movie didn’t quite launch Turner-Smith into offer-only status — she still auditioned for some parts, like the upcoming Tron — but she started to book more substantial roles. She established an ongoing relationship with Kogonada, who cast her in After Yang opposite Colin Farrell. She did White Noise with Noah Baumbach, Murder Mystery 2 with Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston, The Independent with Brian Cox — films that, despite their respective merits, never quite rose above the chatter. But she became more known for her relationship with Jackson, who was having a career resurgence.

They became a real-life celebrity swirl in the age of Shondaland. They leaned into the art and commerce of being publicly in love. Her sense of style ushered them into the fashion world; their coupledom into tabloids. They gamely fed little crumbs about their courtship on late-night shows and in interviews. On The Tonight Show, Jackson told Jimmy Fallon that Turner-Smith had asked him to get married on New Year’s Eve while they were walking on the moonlit beach in Nicaragua, a story that prompted ugly comments about gender roles. In a later interview, Jackson amended the story: After she had proposed, he then proposed to her “the old-fashioned way down on bended knee” after asking her father and stepfather for her hand in marriage.

They did the most on social media. She tweeted funny things like, “Objectifying my husband on the internet is my kink.” They did sponsored content for J.Crew and Motorola. They posted photos of each other and wrote lovey-dovey comments. The one taken around the Critics Choice Awards in 2022 is seared into the archive: Turner-Smith is naked on a hotel balcony, looking over her shoulder, while Jackson is in a full penguin suit with his arm over her butt, artfully circumventing Instagram censors. She captioned it “the cat that got the cream,” and he replied, “You’re talking about me right? I’m the cat that got the cream…because…wow.” (She’s since deleted photos of them from her social media; he’s left his.) They were a couple for the social-media era in the way Brangelina and Bennifer were for the grocery-store checkout counter. She was the rising star, stylish and eat-your-heart-out gorgeous, who represented the now; he was the former child actor who won over millennial hearts as a young hockey player in The Mighty Ducks and the reformed bad boy from Dawson’s Creek. Together they hearkened back to a sexy Obama-era optimism where nostalgia met the future, love wins, and maybe there are some good white men after all.

On the flip side, the vitriol they endured, particularly on her end, suggested the regressive elements of American culture had never really gone away. He had white fans who called her ugly and “like a man”; she had Black people accusing her of internalized racism. “The most painful was the commentary about why I had chosen him for a partner, that I chose him because I hated myself, because I wanted a light-skinned baby: All these things that are not an accurate reflection of why a person falls in love or at least why this person did,” she says.

“When you’re in the public eye, a part of you belongs to the public. It stops being yours and becomes theirs too,” she continues. “I didn’t have an accurate scope of understanding what it would mean to share my relationship with the public. It’s something I will never do again. Ever. That is one major lesson that I took away from this, which is just that people don’t need to know everything.”

Turner-Smith takes out her phone to show me a recent video of Juno in which she interviews her daughter. She asks her name, her age, her favorite color (pink and purple), favorite food (chicken and fries), and what she wants to be when she grows up. “Well, I want to be a warrior mother because I’m strong,” she says. In a way, it’s self-fulfillment of the name she gave her. During a trip to Rome in 2019, Turner-Smith visited the Vatican where she saw the statue of Juno Sospita, the protector of the state wearing a goatskin cloak. She scrolls through the camera roll again to find the photo of the Roman goddess, gaze undaunted, spear in hand. “I look at that picture often and remind myself that this is the energy I named her after,” she says. “So I shouldn’t be surprised that I literally have a warrior.”

Kogonada noticed a richer, more magisterial presence in Turner-Smith onscreen after she had her daughter. She commanded stillness. For The Acolyte, he thought of her immediately for the part of Mother Aniseya. In the third episode, which he directed, he felt her gravitational pull in a scene where Mother Aniseya has a conversation with her daughter Osha. She tells her she will support her decision to go her own way, even if that means leaving the coven forever. “You’re in the middle of Star Wars, and yet it feels quiet all around her,” he says. “Just demanding that we pay attention to the conflict within her of what it means to love and let go. She has a deeper sense of what it meant to be a mother really existentially and viscerally.”

Over the past four years, Turner-Smith has learned to negotiate on her own behalf as a working mother. When she was pregnant with Juno, she was also shooting Michael B. Jordan’s Tom Clancy adaptation, Without Remorse. “Doing an action movie during your second trimester is fucking bonkers,” she says, declining to go into specifics. “I learned to advocate for myself on that film because I had to. And I don’t consider that unique.” She turned down a job because production said that they couldn’t allow her daughter to come to the trailer to nurse. “I’ve had to turn things down because of other people too,” she says. Like who? She pauses. “Now I’m being cryptic. How do I say this?” she says, looking into the distance. “Or how do I say something that isn’t incendiary? Look, when somebody becomes a mother, it does not mean that they stop being everything else that they are. And choosing to have a child with somebody who works means making space for the fact that they need to work and mother together.”

She’s talking about her personal situation, as an actor who was married to another actor, but she’s also talking about the heterosexual situation all working mothers find themselves in. And shouldn’t the world — yes individual men, but institutions more broadly — support working mothers in both roles, rather than ask them to choose one over the other? She sees it happening with her friends: a reversion to gender orthodoxy. “No matter how forward-thinking they say they are, men are subject to the conditioning under which they have been raised. And there is just a little part of every man, which says ‘Once a woman has his child, they need to operate in a certain way,’ that is more indicative of limited traditional roles than it is of reality. Every creative needs a partner who’s got to support their choices.”

Turner-Smith might not use her Tumblr anymore, but her sensibilities live on in Instagram Stories. Her most recent pinned series is for Mother’s Day — her breastfeeding Juno (her daughter’s face obscured), a Nayyirah Waheed poem, a nude photo shoot with a palm frond casting shadows over her pregnant belly. She has long been cozy in her skin; she once spent a summer in her 20s wearing nothing longer than hot pants. During one of our follow-up video calls, we spoke while she sunbathed topless by the pool — free and unbothered. Her sexiness comes from that ease. “I’ve looked the same for a very long time,” she says as we head out the back door of the Chateau Marmont to go check in on her family. “I definitely keep going back and forth about whether I want to get my boobs done, because I breastfed my daughter for three years. My boobs are … They’re relaxed.”

When we arrive at the house, her friend Ryan Horne is lying on the couch with the zoned-out face of a father looking for one second to himself. Horne and Turner-Smith met too long ago to remember when she first moved to L.A.; he’s a native of the city and he owns a number of swimwear brands. They were party friends who have since become parent friends. He spent the day here with his daughter Hunter and his mother, Dee. Along with Turner-Smith’s mother, Hilda; daughter, Juno; and niece Amillia, there’s an intergenerational babysitting club in the house.

“Your daughter’s hilarious,” Horne says to Turner-Smith as we all head out to the back patio. “She goes, ‘This is our kingdom and we don’t need anything but kindness here. And also that means that you don’t tell us what to do, okay?’ And then she walked away.”

“Helloooo?” Turner-Smith calls out. “Are there princesses back here?”

Two little angels appear: Hunter in an ice-blue Elsa dress and Juno in an electric-green Tiana dress. Their grandmothers are chilling on the patio chairs.

“Are you Tiana?” Turner-Smith asks her daughter.

“No, I’m Juno.” she replies.

They want to watch Spidey and His Amazing Friends, so Turner-Smith escorts them upstairs along with her niece to get them set up.

“These kids will wear your ass out,” Hilda says in the voice of someone who has seen it all. This generation of parents, meaning Jodie and Ryan, are way too permissive with their kids, she says, giving them too many choices. She’s wearing leopard athleisure and pink sunglasses and looks unflappable. Turner-Smith and Jackson have reached a temporary joint-custody agreement. Her mother travels with her and Juno to set, the indispensable caretaker when she’s not there. She’s cooking dinner tonight: chicken curry, rice, sautéed cabbage and carrots, and boiled Japanese sweet potatoes. She does a portion without habanero for the babies. The kitchen is an expensive puzzle — there’s a five-figure La Cornue stove that looks like it’s mostly been used for display. Hilda is looking for flour to thicken the curry, and we search around and only come upon cutlery. Eventually, she gives up and grates some bread into it.

We have dinner on the terrace outside, because the glass top of the dining room table is missing — there are almost a dozen Alessandro Michele–era Gucci beechwood chairs crowded around its bare legs. Turner-Smith is in full “mother is mothering” mode. The hour is spent in the manner of all dinners with children: getting the child to eat. She coaxes and coddles before sternly threatening the refusal of ice cream to get Juno to eat one spoonful — the whole bite! — at a time. After dinner, she relieves her mother of kitchen duties and loads the dishwasher before taking Juno upstairs for her bath.

“I just have to do everything that I can to set Juno up to win and to peacefully co-parent with someone whom I once loved very, very much,” Turner-Smith says to me. “Peace is what’s needed right now. Grace is what’s needed right now. Love, empathy, compassion. I’m trying to be all those things and have faith that when I’m all those things, I will see that reflected back toward me.”

The kids come back down and play with Horne, who asks his daughter, “Who’s my girl?” Juno interjects, “No, she’s my girl!” He’s mock wounded. Turner-Smith starts humming “My Girl,” the start of which reminds her she’s supposed to be at a party tonight for A Big Bold Beautiful Journey that she completely blanked on. Margot Robbie is co-hosting a very wholesome Broadway sing-along that started an hour ago. Turner-Smith is supposed to dress up and lead the group in singing “All That Jazz,” but she has already changed into an oversize Care Bears T-shirt (can’t get curry on Beyoncé) and decides she’ll just go as she is. “Stop stressing yourself,” Hilda says to her. “That’s why I’m saying to you, Jodie, ‘I am here.’”

Meanwhile, Turner-Smith tries to get Juno to sit still so she can brush her hair. Eventually everyone is clean, hair tied back, exhausted from swimming, and ready for a little sweet. Juno asks her if they can do their secret handshake. “Of course, baby,” she replies. Juno peers over at Horne and me. “This is supposed to be a secret,” she whispers. We avert our eyes.

E. Alex Jung , 2024-06-14 17:00:00

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