urnee Smollett was in the middle of COVID-19 prep for her new film, “Spiderhead,” when she heard the news. “I’m in the midst of fucking mad and rage right now,” she says. “And this collective sense of grief.”
It’s Wednesday, September 23, the day the Kentucky grand jury announced that none of the police officers who killed Breonna Taylor would be charged for her murder. Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman who worked as an emergency room technician, was killed on March 13, 2020, after three Louisville police officers fired 32 rounds of bullets into her apartment while she slept. One of the officers was indicted for the “wanton endangerment” of Taylor’s neighbors, but no charges were brought in connection with her murder. “She deserved better,” Smollett says. “She deserved better in her life. She deserved better in her death. So many of the Breonna Taylors of the world who’ve fallen and don’t get justice deserve better.”
As a Black woman in America, Smollett, 34, is all too familiar with how Black people continue to be brutalized by the criminal justice system. In 2010, Smollett and her friend Questlove (whose real name is Ahmir Thompson) were swarmed by five police cars after they stopped to take a phone call while picking up a housewarming present for Questlove’s manager. “We were stopped for no reason other than Ahmir is a big Black man with an Afro driving a Mini Coop in Marina del Rey,” Smollett says. “They searched him and they searched me in a very violating way and put us in the back of a cop car.” As Smollett and Questlove sat in the back of the cruiser, they watched as the police searched his vehicle. They were let go without any information as to why they were stopped. The next day, Questlove attended the Grammys. “There was no reason why they pulled us over,” Smollett says.
When she was 12, Smollett’s mother introduced her to Artists For a New South Africa, an organization founded by Alfre Woodard and other actors that worked to end apartheid in South Africa. “Sometimes kids tune out subjects they’re not interested in or that frighten them, but Jurnee has never been age-appropriate at any age she’s been,” says Woodard, who’s known Smollett since she was 9 years old. “She has a focus and purposefulness that she’s had since she was a little girl.” As a teenager, Smollett worked with the organization to teach students about safe sex and how to protect themselves from contracting HIV and AIDS. “I remember some of the students being like, ‘Wait. Aren’t you that girl from “Roll Bounce”?’’ I would say, ‘Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We can take pictures. I just need you to know how to put on a condom,’” Smollett says.
As her nonprofit work continued, Smollett, who had become known for projects like “Eve’s Bayou,” “Full House” and “Selma, Lord, Selma,” wondered if acting was really for her. At age 20, Smollett considered quitting acting entirely to work in the nonprofit world full-time. “I was broke,” she says. “I was over the industry. Not the art side, but the business side. The game you have to play.” The game, Smollett explains, was the lack of interesting opportunities for her as a Black actress. “It was incredibly frustrating to just get into the room for roles I would be excited about,” she says. “I was constantly told, ‘Oh, we’re not willing to go ethnic on that role.’ That’s what my agents were told consistently. That would be the term they used. Casting directors had no shame in saying, ‘Yeah, the role isn’t opening up. The filmmaker isn’t willing to go ethnic.’ I couldn’t even get in the room to compete, which was incredibly frustrating because the roles I could get in the room for were either horror films where I’m killed on page 33 or I’m the sassy Black best friend. It’s very unsatisfying for someone to tell you, ‘Well, you can only create this kind of art.’”
Before pulling the plug on her acting career, however, Smollett was invited to travel to South Africa with Woodard, Samuel L. Jackson and other celebrities to build wells for villages that needed water. It was on that trip that Smollett realized how much her acting career provided her with a platform to help those in need. “I saw the power of art,” Smollett says. “This art is what brought us there. It’s what could save an 8-year-old girl operating a household, taking care of her four younger siblings because both of her parents had passed away from HIV/AIDS. It could save her from having to walk five kilometers just to get water. We could go there and build a well in this township, so she could spend more time in school. This art is what could change lives. If I had been given the gift of art, how dare I not use it?”
Smollett returned to acting and went on to star in TV shows like “Friday Night Lights,” “The Defenders” and “True Blood” before she booked the lead role in Misha Green’s “Underground” in 2015. The series—in which Smollett played a slave who escapes a plantation in Antebellum Georgia—was cancelled after two seasons, but it earned enough critical acclaim that Smollett’s phone was ringing off the hook. “For the first time in my career, I was fielding offers,” she says. Smollett shared some of the offers with Green, who she considers her “fifth invisible agent.” “She was like, ‘No, Jurnee. You can’t do that. That’s trash,’’” Smollett says. “I was like, ‘What are you talking about? This is an Emmy Award-winning show!’”
that audiences haven’t seen a show like “Lovecraft Country” before. “‘Lovecraft Country’ really deconstructs this classic horror genre and reimagines it in a very radical way,” Smollett says of how Black people have been historically misrepresented in horror films. “Misha is literally expanding the gaze. She’s asking us to dream bigger. She’s telling us, ‘You haven’t seen something like this before because your imagination has been limited.’”
“Lovecraft Country” is also the first time in Smollett’s career that she’s been paid the same as her male co-star. The decision, which affected several actresses at HBO, came after Reese Witherspoon had a conversation with the head of HBO and challenged the network to provide gender parity. “My attorney called me with my agent on the phone and was like, ‘So this is a call I don’t get to make very often, but they’re increasing your pay.’ It was wild,” Smollett says. The raise, which also came as a result of Time’s Up, was especially powerful for Smollett after she learned that she made less than her male co-star on “Underground,” despite her name receiving top billing for the show’s promotions. “It just confused me,” Smollett says. “The work is not any less demanding.”
Smollett’s co-star, Jonathan Majors, who plays Leti’s love interest Atticus, would seem to agree. “I was blessed enough to work opposite her, and to experience just how proficient and open she was in the craft of acting,” Majors says. “She is a true partner on screen, and off she has proven to be a kindred spirit and force able to communicate deep emotional thought with genuine levity, to spearhead national movements, and to share a six-piece nugget after a long day of work.”
Smollett based her portrayal of Leti on stories about her maternal grandmother, who she never met but feels like she knows based on a 1950s picture that hung above the fireplace in her childhood home. “She cleaned the homes of white folks, which is something, interestingly enough, Leti says in the pilot she won’t do,” Smollett says. In the third episode of “Lovecraft Country,” Leti buys a house in an all-white neighborhood. Days later, a cross is burned on her front lawn and three white men break into her house armed with bats, planning to attack her. The episode took Smollett back to her childhood memories of also living in an all-white neighborhood where her family was terrorized for the color of their skin. “All I had to do was put on my script: ‘Dead fish on my lawn,’” Smollett says of the moment she and her family found a dead fish outside their house. “I remember my family’s car being keyed with the N-word and a Jewish slur because we were Black and Jewish. I remember going to the grocery store and someone calling my mom the N-word. I remember jogging with my siblings in our neighborhood and some white kids rolling up on us and throwing soda cans and calling us the N-word.”
Smollett views Breonna Taylor’s death as an example of how the lack of safety for Black people, even in their homes, hasn’t changed today. “She was in her home,” Smollett says. “Her safe place that she and her loved ones paid to live in. Even in her home, she is not safe. So if she’s not safe in her home, where is she safe?” She references a quote from Malcom X as an analogy for how little progress this country has made to end systemic racism. “I think a lot about what Malcolm X says. ‘If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that’s still not progress,’” she says. “‘Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. They haven’t even pulled the knife out, much less healed the wound.’ ‘Lovecraft’ coming out now or coming out 10 years ago, I don’t know if it means more or less because the healing hasn’t happened.”
As the 2020 Presidential election approaches, Smollett reminds voters that the work to dismantle white supremacy and the patriarchy isn’t done after they cast their ballot. “There’s always work to do. The work never stops,” she says. “We’ve got to vote. We know that. That’s bare minimum. We’ve got to vote these gutless leaders out.” For Smollett, the rage for Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and thousands of other Black people who have lost their lives as a result of the “unjust” criminal justice system fuels her to keep fighting. “There’s so much power in our voice. We can’t tire. We can’t become weary. We can’t become pessimistic,” she says. “We can have moments in which we feel defeated, but we can’t be defeated.”
She takes a breath. “We might lose a battle, but we have to hold faith that we’ll win the war.”
Watch the finale of “Lovecraft Country” on HBO on Sunday, October 18, at 9 p.m.
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Smollett is conflicted about what it means for her show, “Lovecraft Country”—an HBO series produced by Jordan Peele and J.J. Abrams and set in 1950s Jim Crow America—to come out at this time in the Black Lives Matter movement. “It’s sobering that these themes we explore in ‘Lovecraft’ are still relevant today,” she says. “It’s a shame because it’s indicative of how far we have not traveled as a nation.” In “Lovecraft Country,” which airs its finale on Sunday, October 18, Smollett stars as Leti Lewis, a Black woman haunted both by actual monsters ripped from a horror novel and the racial terrors of white America. Though Smollett acknowledges the parallels between the storylines in “Lovecraft Country” and what’s happening in 2020, she doesn’t consider the show more relevant now. “When would it have not been relevant since 1619?” she says.
Smollett’s fire for activism was ignited when she was just 5 years old, when her mother—who met her father while working for Angela Davis in the Civil Rights Movement in Oakland, California—took her and her five siblings to a busy street corner in Los Angeles to protest the acquittals of the four police officers who beat Rodney King. “I vividly remember her helping us draw out the signs and stand there for people to honk,” Smollett says. “I remember her taking me into the voting booth and letting me press the little lever. She made these things so alive and so active. It wasn’t even a choice for us. It was like breathing air.”
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Green then sent Smollett the script for “Lovecraft Country,” an HBO show based on Matt Ruff’s 2016 book of the same title. From the moment she read it, Smollett knew that the part of Letitia “Leti” Lewis had to be hers. “On one hand, I was so obsessed with it, but I was also really insulted that Misha wasn’t sending the project to me as an offer. She was simply sharing it as, ‘Hey. Here’s what I’m working on,’” Smollett says. “I started taking it personal. Like, wait, does she not know there’s no one else who can play Leti fucking Lewis than me? There’s no one who can do it. Show me.”
Five months went by before Smollett found herself in the office of J.J. Abrams, an executive producer of “Lovecraft Country,” for an unrelated meeting. “He said, ‘Have you read the script for ‘Lovecraft Country?’ You should do it,’” Smollett says. “I was like, ‘Dude! I mean, I think I should do it too!’ But all he said was, ‘You should do it.’” Weeks later, Green offered her the role of Leti. “What we later discussed was that she didn’t want to be the person that always works with the same person,” Smollett says. “Although we’ve now realized there’s a reason people always work with the same people. I knew her process. She knew mine.”
Smollett is aware of the mixed reaction to “Lovecraft Country,” which starts as a young man’s quest to find his father before expanding into a multilayered epic that incorporates elements of horror, fantasy and sci-fi. But, as she explains, those reactions are due to the fact
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Jurnee’s Team: Hair: Marcia Hamilton / Makeup: Vincent Oquendo / Styling: Alexandra Mandelkorn
