When Jodie Turner-Smith and Michael Fassbender were getting into position to film a sex scene for their new TV show, The Agency — a George Clooney-produced American take on the hugely popular French spy series, Le Bureau des Légendes (The Bureau) — things were feeling a bit awkward.
“It's totally unnatural. It's not sexy,” she says, sitting across from me in a brightly lit room of Embankment’s prestigious Corinthia Hotel, flanked by various staff, crew and publicists. A boom mic hangs above us in preparation for later filmed interviews.
It’s the exact type of environment in which Turner-Smith is usually asked to simulate sex with another actor. One who, in this case, she’d only just started working with. Unsexy makes sense.
“You're being very intimate with the person who’s not your intimate partner,” she says, “and Michael and I did our intimate scenes, like, straight out, before we got to get to know each other.”
Then, as director Joe Wright gave instructions on exactly how the pair should be positioned while having sex, Fassbender turned to Turner-Smith. “He said, ‘Like two beetles’,” she recalls, before falling into fits of laughter. “I couldn't even do that take because I was just, like, crying with laughter.”
Turner-Smith and Fassbender are each other’s main scene partners in The Agency, where they play lovers caught up in the covert world of espionage. Fassbender is “Martian”, a long term undercover spy who gets yanked out of Ethiopia to return to the CIA base in London at a moment’s notice, while Turner-Smith is Sami Zahir, the astute, patriotic, secret Sudanese girlfriend he’s been hiding from his employers.
“He's an intense actor, but he's not a super intense person,” Turner-Smith says of Fassbender. “He's a really down to earth, funny person. He's really unserious, honestly.”
The 38-year-old Peterborough-born actor’s breakthrough role was Angela ‘Queen’ Johnson in 2019’s Queen & Slim, opposite Daniel Kaluuya, playing the part of Ernest "Slim" Hines.
The film follows a date that goes from bad to life-threatening as Turner-Smith and Kaluuya’s characters are pulled over by a racist cop on the way home. After a tussle, the duo accidentally kill the officer and go on the run to evade capture, finding true love on the way.
This partnership came easy to Turner-Smith, who still counts Kaluuya as one of her close friends. She was at his statue unveiling in Leicester Square last month, along with her mother and four-year-old daughter, who she shares with her ex-husband, the actor Joshua Jackson.
The statue, which depicts a scene from hit film Get Out, was voted in by popular demand. “People make a lot of bad choices. But you know what? They made the right one there,” she says. When Get Out was first released in cinemas, Turner-Smith went to see it three times. ‘I would be like, [to her friends], ‘Have you seen it? Let’s go see it. You haven’t seen it? Let’s go right now.’”
It’s clear that Turner-Smith is a huge fan of Kaluuya’s. “There's not a person that is more deserving of having everything that this life has, everything that is good, than Daniel Kaluuya. He is a good person,” she says.
Six months after Queen & Slim was released, George Floyd was arrested by Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin, who detained Floyd by kneeling on his neck for nine minutes, killing him. Floyd’s murder ignited the Black Lives Matter movement and prompted protests across the world, in scenes not dissimilar to the ending of Queen & Slim. “I watched the video and I wish I hadn't done it,” Turner-Smith says. “The way that he cried out for his mother as he was being murdered, just sat with me in this way…”
Turner-Smith had just given birth to her daughter the month before Floyd’s death. “When you’re nursing you can feel how everything energetically is passing from you to the child,” she says, “and I was trying to protect her from feeling that grief, anguish, anger, that pain.” It was because of this that Turner-Smith didn’t join the protests, which didn’t sit well with some of her friends. “I remember having friends of mine who didn't understand why I wasn't going on the streets. I fell out with some people.”
After Queen & Slim, Turner-Smith picked up a habit of playing queens, by name or by nature. “I love that typecasting,” she laughs. In 2021, she was cast as Anne Boleyn in the AMC miniseries about the final months of the Tudor queen’s life. And earlier this year, she played a witchy, pseudo-magical character known as Dragon Queen in Apple TV+’s Bad Monkey, alongside Vince Vaughn.
Turner-Smith is currently living in Los Angeles with her daughter. She and Joshua Jackson have shared custody of her since their split in 2023, which made headlines after Turner-Smith suddenly filed for divorce, shattering the image of their five-year-long, picture-perfect, happy relationship.
When I ask if, like her character Sami in The Agency, she would do anything for love, she answers enigmatically: “[Sami is] married, so she knows how it goes when you could love somebody and then that suddenly goes away. But life goes on.” It’s unclear whether Sami is the only person we’re talking about here.
On the way to her starry life in Los Angeles, Turner-Smith lived in some considerably less stylish locations. First Peterborough, where she was born and raised until she was 10, then Gaithersburg, Maryland, where she moved with her mother, brother and half-sister after her parents divorced.
Aged 18, Turner-Smith enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh, where she studied finance in preparation for her post-graduate job at a bank. “I thought I was gonna have a really stable life,” she recalls, “when I was in banking, I knew immediately that I didn't want to do that.” She remembers looking around and seeing her co-workers enjoying themselves. “And I was like, ‘It's possible to enjoy your job?’”
Then came a chance meeting with rapper-producer Pharrell, who Turner-Smith was introduced to via a mutual friend. “He was like, ‘F*** that! You need to be in front of the camera!’” she says. “And there was something about his enthusiasm that was really motivating for me, to believe in myself, to try.”
Just before moving to the LA in 2009, Turner-Smith booked one of her first acting jobs. A small, wordless part in the music video for Walkin’ On The Moon by THE-DREAM featuring Kanye West. In the video, West leads a frightened looking Turner-Smith, who is wearing a white swimsuit and heels, through a futuristic spaceship which couldn’t be more 2008. “Kanye kept being like, ‘Look more scared!’ Not like, meanly, but it was very loud,” she laughs. “I was like, ‘I am, I am scared!’”
The jump to LA was equally terrifying for Turner-Smith, though she is now so glad she made the leap. “I was afraid of not seeing what life had to offer for me,” she remembers. “That was the first step in a long line of me trusting my intuition.”
As for what she’d tell that young girl now? “I think I’m just telling her, well done you, trusting your gut, fear be damned. Because that’s really all you have.”
The Agency is streaming on Paramount+ from November 30
