Jodie Turner-Smith

Peterborough-born Jodie Turner-Smith followed an unconventional route from finance and corporate banking to modelling, independent cinema and major international productions, becoming one of the most distinctive British screen actors of her generation.

Peterborough beginnings

Jodie Turner-Smith was born in Peterborough on 7 September 1986. Her parents were Jamaican, and she was the only one of her siblings born outside Jamaica. She spent the first ten years of her life in Peterborough before moving to the United States with members of her family.

Although her life has since crossed countries and cultures, Turner-Smith has continued to identify Peterborough as the place she comes from. Speaking to actor Colin Farrell in 2019, she described herself simply: “I’m from Peterborough.”

Jamaican culture remained central to her upbringing. She has recalled a home filled with food, conversation, laughter and stories, and has spoken about gradually developing a deeper understanding of her Jamaican identity while living outside the island.

After her parents separated, Turner-Smith settled in Gaithersburg, Maryland, near Washington DC. Arriving in the United States as a dark-skinned Black British girl with an English accent made her conscious from an early age of how identity can change according to place and perception. Those experiences would later inform both her acting and her public conversations about representation.

From finance to modelling

Acting was not Turner-Smith’s original career plan. She studied finance at the University of Pittsburgh, graduating in 2008, and entered corporate banking. It was a secure and conventional route, but she soon realised that it did not offer the creative life she wanted.

A chance meeting with musician and producer Pharrell Williams encouraged her to consider modelling. In 2009, aged 22, she left banking and moved to Los Angeles, despite having no established contacts or professional experience in the entertainment industry.

She signed with a modelling agency and secured commercial work, including an early campaign for Levi’s. She also appeared in music videos for artists including The-Dream, MGMT, Zayn Malik, Noah Cyrus and Labrinth.

Modelling and commercial work allowed Turner-Smith to become comfortable in front of a camera. Television adverts helped her gain professional acting eligibility, while auditions for smaller productions gradually opened another possible career. What began as a change of direction from banking became a long process of learning the entertainment industry from the ground up.

First acting roles

Turner-Smith made her television acting debut in 2013, appearing as a siren in the HBO supernatural drama True Blood. During the early part of her career, she was often credited as Jodie Smith.

Further television appearances and small film roles followed. She made her feature-film debut in Nicolas Winding Refn’s visually distinctive The Neon Demon in 2016.

A more substantial opportunity arrived when she was cast as Sergeant Azima Kandie in the action drama The Last Ship. After initially joining in a recurring capacity, she became a series regular and appeared across the programme’s final two seasons.

In 2018 she played Melantha Jhirl in Nightflyers, a science-fiction series based on a novella by George R. R. Martin. The role gave her greater dramatic responsibility and foreshadowed the science-fiction and fantasy projects that would become an important part of her later career.

She followed this with the crime drama Jett, playing Josie alongside Carla Gugino. By 2019, after almost a decade of modelling, commercials, music videos and supporting parts, Turner-Smith was ready for her first leading film role.

The Queen & Slim breakthrough

Turner-Smith’s international breakthrough came in Melina Matsoukas’s 2019 film Queen & Slim, written by Lena Waithe. She starred opposite fellow British actor Daniel Kaluuya as Angela Johnson, known as Queen, a defence lawyer whose first date with Slim becomes a flight across America after a fatal confrontation with a police officer.

The film combined romance and road movie with an examination of racism, policing, violence and Black identity in the United States. Turner-Smith brought Queen a guarded intensity which gradually gave way to vulnerability and intimacy as the two central characters travelled together.

The role was particularly significant because the production had initially been looking for an American performer. Turner-Smith drew upon the experience of having lived between British, Jamaican and African-American cultural contexts to create the character.

Her performance earned critical praise and nominations from several Black film and women film critics’ organisations. More importantly, it established her as a leading actor capable of carrying an ambitious international feature film.

Becoming Anne Boleyn

In 2021, Turner-Smith returned to British television to take the title role in Channel 5’s three-part drama Anne Boleyn. The psychological thriller concentrated on the final months of the Tudor queen’s life, presenting events through Anne’s perspective as her position at court became increasingly dangerous.

The production used identity-conscious casting rather than attempting to reproduce the historical appearance of every character. Casting a Black actor as one of England’s most familiar queens challenged long-established expectations about who could occupy a leading role in a British period drama.

The decision attracted extensive discussion, including racist criticism, but Turner-Smith argued that Anne’s emotional story – ambition, motherhood, betrayal, power and survival – could speak across differences of race and period.

Her performance presented Anne not simply as a victim awaiting execution, but as an intelligent and politically aware woman attempting to retain control in a world designed to deny it to her. The role strengthened Turner-Smith’s reputation for choosing characters whose identities and circumstances invite wider cultural conversations.

Film, television and science fiction

Following Queen & Slim, Turner-Smith moved between independent drama, action films, comedy, historical television and large-scale science fiction.

In the 2021 action thriller Without Remorse, she played Lieutenant Commander Karen Greer alongside Michael B. Jordan. In Kogonada’s thoughtful science-fiction drama After Yang, released in 2022, she and Colin Farrell played parents confronting questions of memory, technology, family and loss after their daughter’s android companion stopped working.

She also appeared in Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of White Noise, the Netflix comedy Murder Mystery 2 and the final series of Sex Education, in which she made an unexpected appearance as God.

In 2024 Turner-Smith entered the Star Wars universe as Mother Aniseya in the Disney+ series The Acolyte. Aniseya was the leader of a community of Force-sensitive women and the mother of twins Mae and Osha. The role allowed Turner-Smith to explore leadership, spirituality and the competing demands of parenthood and communal responsibility.

That same year, she played Gracie, also known as the Dragon Queen, in the Apple TV comedy mystery Bad Monkey. Set partly in the Bahamas, the role combined grief, mysticism, environmental conflict and dark humour.

Turner-Smith then joined Michael Fassbender, Jeffrey Wright and Richard Gere in the international espionage drama The Agency. She plays Sami Zahir, a professor of social anthropology whose past relationship with a covert CIA officer draws her into a dangerous conflict between private emotion and international intelligence. The series returned for a second season in June 2026.

In Disney’s Tron: Ares, released in 2025, she played Athena, a highly advanced computer programme entering the physical world. The production demanded extensive strength, movement and stunt training and gave Turner-Smith one of her most physically demanding roles.

Representation, identity and fashion

Turner-Smith has used her public platform to discuss racism, colourism and the limited range of opportunities traditionally offered to dark-skinned Black women in film and television. Her own career has repeatedly placed her in genres and roles from which performers like her were once routinely excluded: historical queens, romantic leads, action figures, scientists, spiritual leaders and characters within major science-fiction franchises.

She has also argued that representation requires more than diverse casting. Studios and broadcasters, she has suggested, must support performers when they face racist abuse and create conditions in which a wider variety of stories and perspectives can flourish.

Fashion remains another important part of her creative identity. Her early experience as a model developed into an international profile built around adventurous red-carpet styling, fashion editorials and collaborations with major designers. Rather than treating fashion as separate from performance, Turner-Smith frequently uses clothing to extend the visual world of the projects she promotes.

Her appearances during the promotion of Tron: Ares, for example, drew upon technological and futuristic imagery associated with the film. This approach has made her a prominent figure in contemporary screen fashion as well as an established actor.

Jodie Turner-Smith and Peterborough

Turner-Smith’s connection with Peterborough lies principally in her birth and first decade of childhood. It should not be overstated, but it remains an important part of a life shaped by movement between places, countries and cultural identities.

Her story belongs within a modern understanding of Peterborough: a city shaped by migration, international connections and communities whose influence reaches far beyond its boundaries. Her Jamaican family background also reflects the Caribbean contribution to Peterborough’s social and cultural development during the second half of the twentieth century.

From a childhood in Peterborough to banking in Pittsburgh, modelling in Los Angeles and leading roles in British and international productions, Turner-Smith’s career has been defined by reinvention. She did not enter acting through drama school or an established theatrical route, but through persistence, experimentation and a willingness to change direction.

Jodie Turner-Smith’s journey from Peterborough to Hollywood is not simply a story of fame. It is a story about crossing cultures, challenging expectations and creating space for a broader range of people to be seen at the centre of the screen.