Tudor Queen Jodie Turner-Smith for ELLE Magazine

Jodie Turner-Smith appears on a special January 2021 digital cover of ELLE modeling pieces from the hotly-anticipated The North Face x Gucci collaboration.

Jodie opens up about playing a Tudor queen, making her directorial debut, what the birth of her daughter with husband, actor Joshua Jackson taught her about strength and filming the action movie “Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse” alongside Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Bell. For the film, Smith took on the role of an ass-kicking heroine during her second trimester of pregnancy. “The men think they’re hard-core,” Smith says, cracking up, “but they could never do what they do while also making a baby. They just couldn’t.”

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On staring in Melina Matsoukas’s Queen & Slim, a tale of Black love and survival that has become even more powerful in the wake of this past summer’s Black Lives Matter protests: “I really think that we made a classic, and [that] 10 years from now, it will be viewed that way as well,” she says. “Black artists are not only the engine, but also the car. We are in the driver’s seat, telling our own stories.”

Turner-Smith has a theory about why we’re still, nearly a half-millennium after her beheading, so enthralled by Anne Boleyn, whom Turner-Smith has signed on to play in an as-yet-unnamed series: “We can only infer who she was, because she left no paper trail that would hint at her imagination. She’s endlessly fascinating for that reason,” she says. With her portrayal, Turner-Smith wanted to “tell the story of the woman who sits at the center of the myth, and make that story an accessible one—one that’s not entirely about class, but about humanity. Because whether a woman is a queen or a housekeeper, she is not exempt from any of the challenges and trials that women face in navigating their bodies, love, or the patriarchy,” she says. “There’s an opportunity to tell a really human story and for it to feel that much more accessible because a Black woman is playing her.”

[Photo Credit: Ruth Ossai for ELLE Magazine]

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