Sunday Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Jodie’s all set to be the queen of Hollywood
FROM PETERBOROUGH to PALACE FOR STAR
HOLLYWOOD has a new queen in waiting... and a role as Anne Boleyn is set to confirm her status as acting royalty.
British star Jodie Turner-Smith is the first black actress to play Henry VIII’s ill-fated second wife, beheaded on the king’s orders.
A three-part drama – called simply Anne Boleyn – will lift Jodie’s profile in the UK, where she grew up before moving to the US.
A former banker, she is already a big name in the States after starring in Queen & Slim, the hit 2019 movie about a couple on the run from police after an accidental shooting.
While her character’s name was Queen, that is where the similarities end with the Tudor wife Jodie, 34, is now playing.
She said: “I am looking forward to bringing my heart and spirit into this daring retelling of the fall of this iconic woman.”
Anne Boleyn, mother of Queen Elizabeth I, was executed so that Henry could marry Jane Seymour in his quest for a male heir.
In a first glimpse of Jodie in the role, she wears a black frock and white veil, bearing the resigned expression of a condemned woman.
The hotly anticipated Channel 5 drama – screened late this year – co-stars Mark Stanley as Henry. For Jodie, it marks a remarkable journey from Peterborough to the palace.
ACCENT
She grew up in a village on the outskirts of the Cambridgeshire town where she and her siblings were the only black kids in school.
Her parents are Jamaican and she has a brother and a half-sister.
Jodie grew up listening to Grace Jones and idolising supermodels like Iman and Naomi Campbell. When her parents divorced, mum Hilda and the kids moved to America.
They lived in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and Hilda worked as a cleaner and a nanny.
Jodie said her accent and her colour made things difficult. She revealed in an interview: “Even when I first moved to America, just the idea that I was a dark-skinned black girl from England with an accent.
“It’s one thing to be a black girl, but it’s another to be a dark black girl. I was chastised for that. I was chastised for the way I spoke.”
She said even the black community rejected her, telling her: “You talk like a white girl.”
So Jodie changed her clothes, her shoes and, most significantly, her patterns of speech – which she would practise in the mirror.
She told of unhappy times as a 17-year-old and posted Instagram snaps of herself from her days in high school.
Jodie recalled: “I remember how badly I hated myself and hated the dark skin that made people call me ugly.
“How I changed my voice, changed my hair, became captain of this and president of that, used my intelligence to build a wall around me, spent years in the practise of bending and shaping myself into the most acceptable form of Jodie for the people around me until there was nothing of me left but hate for a person I didn’t recognise.”
She later studied in Pittsburgh, landing an internship at PNC Bank during her degree, and a job once she had graduated.
Jodie was working as a corporate banker when she met singer Pharrell Williams at a concert by N.E.R.D. and he told her: “You need to be in front of a camera!”
She took his advice and appeared in a string of music clips – once alongside Kanye West in the video for Walkin’ on the Moon. From the music to their clients – lighter, different hair. I was scene she went on to become a successful dark-skinned with no hair. Or they wanted model, with a high-profile Levi’s campaign. you to look obviously African.”
At that time she based herself in London After a few months she returned to LA, and could easily get the train to see her dad, doing hotel work and TV ads until screen who still lives in Peterborough. roles came her way. She appeared in But her experience of modelling in the comedy series Mad Dogs, action drama capital was plagued by racism. Of the London The Last Ship, and sci-fi tale Nightflyers. modelling agency circuit, she said: “It was But her big break came in Queen & awful. I’d hear things Slim, with fellow Brit and Oscar like, ‘We’ve already nominee Daniel Kaluuya. But Jodie felt got one black girl. her identity was called into question
Well, she’s mixed once more during auditions. race, but she’s She said: “Daniel was already our black girl British. So, again, I needed to be and anyway more American to other people, she doesn’t and because I wasn’t American, work much’. that was making me
“They not good enough. I was so wanted a triggered that after two of version of my three auditions, I went blackness into the car and just cried.” more Despite the challenges the film palatable received critical acclaim, and Amer
ican and British directors are now desperate to have her in their films. In 2019 she married Joshua Jackson, 42 – the Dawson’s Creek actor she had a crush on when she was a teen.
They have a 10-month-old daughter. Jodie even watches his ’90s drama when they are apart because she misses him “so much”.
Celebrity pals include Jay-Z and Beyonce – a friendship cemented after Jodie hit back at a film critic who targeted the couple’s daughter, Blue Ivy Carter, over her looks. Her co-stars are A-listers too. This year she appears with Michael B. Jordan in action thriller Without Remorse, Colin Farrell in sci-fi drama After Yang, and John Boyega in IRA thriller Borderland. And as she balances work and motherhood, Jodie wants a variety of roles, saying: “True strength is not found in force and brutality, but in vulnerability. I would love to do more action, and action where I’m allowed to be a woman.” Buoyed by Anne Boleyn, she can probably name her price. No doubt it’ll be a king’s ransom.
I look forward to Boleyn... bringing my heart and spirit into this iconic woman JODIE TAYLOR-SMITH ON HER NEW ROLE AS TUDOR QUEEN