Jodie Turner-Smith on playing Anne Boleyn: 'I should be allowed to tell this story'

It’s early morning in New York when I log on to Zoom to interview Jodie Turner-Smith, who is in a hotel room recovering from a few days off after being unwell. ‘I’ve been on my back for five days,’ she tells me. ‘It was really rough but now I’m feeling good.’ Dressed in a bubblegum-pink fine-knit Gucci sweater, strikingly beautiful with hardly any make-up on and her hair in braids, the first five minutes of our conversation include a discussion about the dissolution of the monasteries in Tudor Britain.

That’s because the 34-year-old actress is about to star as the most famous of Henry VIII’s wives in Anne Boleyn, the hotly anticipated Channel 5 psychological thriller exploring the final months of the ill-fated queen. Jodie is the first black actress to play the role. ‘I found her endlessly fascinating, and playing her left so much room to interpret,’ she says.

Born in Peterborough to Jamaican parents, she has an older brother and sister, a younger brother and sister, and four younger stepbrothers. When she was nine, her parents divorced and she moved to America with her mother. After studying at the University of Pittsburgh, she worked in banking – but her ambitions were always to move to Los Angeles to become a writer. In her early 20s, a year into her job as a corporate banker, she was in LA visiting a friend who introduced her to Pharrell Williams, backstage at a N.E.R.D concert.

‘That really was a tipping point for me. Somebody gives you just a little bit of confidence in yourself,’ she says. ‘He told me the person who needs to believe in you the most, is you. Meeting him made me develop this theory in life, which is that I have nothing to lose and everything to gain by just trying.’

He then introduced her to the director Hype Williams, who cast Jodie in The-Dream and Kanye West’s music video for Walkin’ On the Moon in 2009. She signed to Next Model Management where she was booked for a Levi’s campaign, and landed a few small TV gigs. Her breakout role, though, finally came in 2019 when she played the lead of Queen in the critically acclaimed film Queen & Slim – a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde tale set against the backdrop of deep-rooted racism in the US, alongside the now Oscar-winning British actor Daniel Kaluuya.

Since then she has married Joshua Jackson (yes, the teenage heart-throb Pacey from Dawson’s Creek), filmed action movie Without Remorse alongside Michael B Jordan and Jamie Bell while pregnant with her first child, and given birth last summer at the height of the pandemic. Next up she’ll be filming the lead in the science fiction film After Yang, opposite Colin Farrell.

It’s safe to say Jodie has not only had a busy few years, but is one of the new crop of Hollywood rising stars on the brink of going stratospheric. Something of a darling of the fashion world too, Gucci snapped her up last year to front its Bloom perfume campaign, and pre-Covid, she and husband Jackson were a red-carpet-favourite couple.

Back to Anne Boleyn. The dark three-part period drama adopted ‘identity-conscious casting’, to allow the film-makers the freedom to tell her story in a way that would resonate with a contemporary audience. Directed by Lynsey Miller, and co-starring Mark Stanley as Henry VIII and I May Destroy You’s Paapa Essiedu as Anne’s brother, George Boleyn, Jodie was a favourite on the list long before she was cast; the producers had been impressed by her in Queen & Slim.

The drama is told from Anne Boleyn’s perspective during the last five months of her life; from the height of her power in court as Henry VIII’s second wife, pregnant with a second child, to her losing her baby and being publicly beheaded for treason in 1536. In preparation for the role, Jodie read The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn by Eric Ives, and worked closely with the historian Dan Jones, creating a ‘bible’ of the notorious queen.

‘What I learned was that nothing was ever in Boleyn’s own words,’ says Jodie. ‘It was all interpretations, because we don’t have a single letter of hers describing her state of mind, or how she really felt. The script resonated with me as a story about motherhood, the way that female bodies are policed, politicised, and in Anne’s case, about whether her body “worked” according to the patriarchy.’ Jodie, whose accent still has a detectable Midlands slant, speaks in detail. She’s well researched. I think she’d make a brilliant dinner party guest.

Her portrayal of Boleyn is, in the best possible way, brutal. Her Anne is a woman with a razor-sharp tongue and almost-cocky confidence, but in the background is her desperate need to clutch on to the life she’s created, and secure a legacy for her daughter Elizabeth. As she nears the end of her life, her husband’s attentions are elsewhere, courting Jane Seymour, and she is pregnant with a much-longed-for baby – the second episode portrays a powerful depiction of loss as Boleyn gives birth to a stillborn child.

Filmed just six months after having her own daughter, Jodie tells me, ‘I felt so close to the process of labour and delivery but it was more than just her losing the child in that scene. There is also something so horrific about the journey of giving birth to the child, even though it was no longer living.’

Although Boleyn is a polarising figure, ‘When we look at her through a modern lens she was so ahead of her time, and deeply feminist,’ Jodie explains. ‘She was fighting for women to have this seat at the table in conversations about politics and religion. She wasn’t afraid to show up in a way that was really strong.’

On being the first black woman to play the character of Anne Boleyn, Jodie is frank. ‘I have an understanding of how polarising a concept it would be to have me as a black woman playing this role. But it was an opportunity for me to bring my individual identity to this and distil it down to a human story, as opposed to a story that’s about whiteness or class,’ she says. ‘It’s a story that I’m able to tell, and that I should be allowed to tell it. I think it’s time for us all to be able to have the same opportunities.’

Jodie isn’t the first black actor to play a ‘white’ role: in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit production Hamilton, black actors were cast as historical white figures; while the characters in Netflix’s Bridgerton would also typically have been white if not for identity-conscious casting. Does she feel there’s a shift happening in the industry?

‘We are in a time where we see that historically, actors of colour have been sidelined,’ she tells me. ‘They have not had the opportunity to be a part of storytelling. In many ways, we are remedying that but it’s not about erasing anything, it’s more about saying, “Hey, if we can suspend disbelief, can you actually allow this story to be more appealing in a contemporary sense?” Because you are looking at the humanity of it, and not saying it’s limited to only certain people to be able to tell it.’

Unsurprisingly, when it was revealed Jodie would be playing the part of Anne Boleyn, the news was met with varied reactions. Did she receive any negativity? ‘Anne Boleyn is a character loved by so many and a story so well known that people are attached to the way that it looks in their own imagination. So, when you introduce something that is so contrary there’s going to be resistance. I think it’s to be expected,’ she says.

This past decade has seen a great revival of period dramas, but when asked whether she watched The Crown, Jodie gives a telling laugh. ‘I have seen some episodes, but it’s not really my kind of show.’ So what about the monarchy today? She smiles. ‘I would not consider myself a monarchist.’ She pauses, choosing her words carefully, ‘I think it’s interesting that the institution is not changing with the time, or quickly enough. We have to look at things in a modern context. And only then we will recognise that certain things are archaic, and don’t really serve us as a community and are limiting us. I think we should keep those things in stories and move on to something else in reality.’

Does she see the Duchess of Sussex as a great moderniser of the monarchy, I ask? ‘I think that Meghan could have been that,’ she says. ‘It was a terrible missed opportunity, the way in which it was not allowed to be something that really modernises that institution, and to change it to something for the better. I think that’s why there’s dysfunction there.’

Jodie, meanwhile, is determined to take on new opportunities with open arms. She was a few months pregnant in late 2019 when she filmed Without Remorse in Berlin, an epic action-thriller in which she plays a Navy SEAL, jumping out of helicopters and doing underwater stunts. Was she anxious? ‘I was scared,’ she admits. ‘Because at the time, I was experiencing subchorionic leaks; it’s when you get bleeding outside of the pregnancy. I was terrified at times, because doing all of this physical activity would then make me bleed heavier.

‘I tried to perform to the best of my ability, while also making sure that I had clear boundaries for everyone that I was working with – because the most important thing I was doing was producing that life inside of me.’

In what she considers a ‘silver lining’, the film industry and country went into lockdown during her final few months of pregnancy, and she gave birth to her daughter Janie last summer following a home birth over four days. ‘I was doing something so extremely physical at home, so I was grateful to have the time to focus on healing. There’s so much pressure, and especially as women who work, to just get right back to it,’ she tells me. ‘And so because everything was shut down I didn’t have to be trying to push myself to snap back and get back out there. It was a relief to stay in one place. I just had the stresses of, “Oh God, am I doing this right?’’’

She did give birth, however, against the backdrop of the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd. Living in West Hollywood at the time, she tells me, ‘All of the protests were right on our doorstep. It was so intense. I remember watching the nine-minute video, and I was just so broken.’ How did she cope with childbirth itself? ‘I just had to compartmentalise. I needed to feel safe. And what a heavy time for a child to be born.’

For her, the Black Lives Matter movement is personal as well as political. ‘At the end of the day, I’m black, and my life matters,’ she says. ‘With everything that I do, all of it is my assertion that I deserve to be here. And that I shouldn’t have to apologise for my presence. And that equality is my right.

‘Life is a process of figuring out how to speak up for yourself, and how to not tolerate someone treating you as though you’re less than because of the colour of your skin. It’s something that I’ve definitely learned to do, partly from seeing my own mother and father assert themselves. It’s an example that I have to live for my daughter as well, to teach her that she doesn’t have to apologise for her presence and her existence.’

How does she feel about bringing up her daughter in LA? ‘What’s interesting is that, except for those first months of her life, we haven’t lived in LA, we’ve been in New York. We don’t know where we’re going to bring her up. Utopia doesn’t actually exist, you know – everywhere has its problems and flaws. When I was growing up in the UK, there was less awareness of racism. But my family’s Jamaican, so you talk about the skeletons of imperialism and racism, and what that has created. The black experience in America is unique to America, and the history of this country.

‘Maybe I’m just going to lean into what is the reality of my life, that we kind of live everywhere. I don’t have a single clue, I don’t think any parent really ever does.’

She feels fortunate, though, that ‘my husband has made sure that I feel so supported, and I was lucky my mum was on furlough from her job in a jewellery store for the early months, which allowed her to be with me for so long’. Her mother, who is now retired, stayed with her for three months before returning to her home in the Deep South.

As for her famous husband, the story is that Jackson and Jodie met at Usher’s birthday party. Is it true? Her face lights up. ‘Everyone is always saying that we met at a party. And actually we met at a charity event in 2018. We saw each other across the room, and that was it. Well, he saw me across the room. I had already seen him earlier!’ she laughs. ‘And he didn’t know I already staked claim to that. Of course, I wasn’t going to go and talk to him but when he saw me, he introduced himself. We’ve been inseparable ever since.’

Are there any parts of ‘sudden’ fame she doesn’t like? ‘Sometimes I roll out of bed if I need to run over to the shop really quickly – and I guess that’s why there are so many paparazzi pictures with me looking like a hot mess. I just don’t want my life to be dictated by the fact that somebody might photograph me outside.’

When she’s got the time and the occasion, though, Jodie loves to dress up. ‘Fashion is costume, you know? It’s a really fun element.’ I tell her one of my favourite red-carpet looks from 2020 was her pregnant in a yellow gown at the Baftas. The dress was custom-designed by Gucci’s Alessandro Michele.

‘It’s amazing that Gucci wanted to design a gown for me to wear while I’m pregnant. How lucky am I?’ she says, gleefully. ‘I love getting dressed up and going to a party. It’s like you’ve got to take a moment to enjoy it all, because otherwise what are you working so hard for? You can’t take any of this with you when you leave.

‘Even with acting, as long as people keep giving me shots to get better, I’m going to keep taking them. My success doesn’t feel so much overnight, but I guess what happens overnight is people open their eyes to you.’

Our eyes were opened to the range of Jodie’s talents in Queen & Slim, but with her brilliant performance in Anne Boleyn and a host of high-profile projects lined up, there’s no doubt we’ll all be watching her for a long time to come. I bet she’s glad she went to that concert all those years ago. 

‘Anne Boleyn’ is coming to Channel 5 tonight at 9pm