Jodie Turner-Smith

The British-born actress gets some “ocean energy” during the Pirelli Cal shoot

For Jodie Turner-Smith’s Pirelli Calendar beach shoot, she didn’t just splash in the waves, “I was all the way in,” the Queen & Slim star recalls. “I was like, ‘oh, get the hair in and everything.’”

Although it was her first time working with Cal photographer Ethan James Green, the actress instantly “loved his energy, his vibe” and enjoyed soaking up the “grounding, empowering” energy of the ocean.

“Any time somebody has a camera in front of you, you have to really open up to that person. It’s so exposing to be photographed,” says Turner-Smith, who was born to Jamaican parents in the UK but emigrated to America at the age of 10. “But I can say this is a moment I really loved, and that’s when I was fully in the water, because it’s something about the ocean that felt, and always feels, really incredible.”

Jodie Turner-Smith studied finance at college and worked briefly in banking before setting her sights on something different and moving to Los Angeles.

After starting as a modelmodelling and appearing in music videos, she began acting, landing parts in vampire series True Blood, George R. R. Martin’s show Nightflyers and post-apocalyptic drama The Last Ship.

Then came her breakout role in the 2019 movie Queen & Slim, where she starred opposite Daniel Kaluuya and won critical acclaim for her portrayal of a lawyer who goes on the run with her Tinder date after they kill a policeman.

She has since appeared in numerous television series and films including Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse, After Yang with Colin Farrell, The Independent alongside Brian Cox and Murder Mystery 2 with Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler. This year alone she has starred in “Star Wars Acolyte”, “Bad Monkey” and in November will star opposite Michael Fassbender in the “The Agency”. Next year she will return to film with two major films, “A Big Bold Beautiful World” opposite Margot Robbie and “Tron 3” opposite Jared Leto.

Is there an artist, art piece, sculpture or any sort of art that really resonates as beautiful with you?

Everywhere I go I’m always playing music and carrying sound with me and I think that’s one of the things that influenced me the most. Also being Jamaican, I feel Caribbean culture is very much about sound. And there’s something about instruments, that connect spirit and soul [and] resonate with us on a cellular level.

When you close your eyes do you have a moment or a memory of beauty that comes to mind?

When I close my eyes, I feel the stillness of the earth and existence. As soon as your vision is cut off, then all the other senses come alive, and so there’s something about feeling more deeply present when you close your eyes.

Is there a smell that you associate with beauty?

Definitely. Scent is a big thing for me. I always come everywhere with my palo santo, my incense… I have to feel joy in what I smell. [Scent] always leads me into other feelings. I know that when I smell good, and when I smell good things, it leads me to a certain state of mind.

Jodie Turner-Smith Calendar Pirelli 2025 Interview 1

A taste?

Taste is also so connected to scent. My family is Jamaican and I like very powerful tastes, flavours, spices.

How about a sound?

We’re sitting by the beach right now and we can hear the sound of the waves and that sound tells us about existence. [It’s] telling us about what the moon is doing, controlling the tides and the ocean. It’s literally speaking to our souls and showing us how connected we are to this Mother Earth… even if we don’t recognise it in that way.

What would you say is important to add to the discourse on beauty right now?

Oftentimes when we talk about beauty, people think that aesthetic beauty is something that is coming purely from the outside. And I truly believe that what we perceive as aesthetic, what we perceive as something that we’re just visually taking in, is actually coming from the inside. There is a spiritual resonance to beauty.

I think that, as we are beginning to expand our views of what beauty is… we’re realising that, no, this is actually about a person’s spirit that you see.

When someone is in tune with [their] self, that is a beauty beyond anything that we can define, and that we’ve been taught to define, as beauty.