Jurnee Smollett, the Lovecraft Country star whose best shows keep ending too soon

Jurnee Smollett

Photo: Penpusher / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 1, 1986 New York City, New York, United States
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), Gridiron Gang, The Great Debaters
Awards	2 Critics' Choice · San Diego Film Critics Society · NAACP Image

Jurnee Smollett has a habit of outlasting the shows built around her. She led Underground, a drama about the Underground Railroad that its network dropped after two seasons. As Leti Lewis in Lovecraft Country she earned an Emmy nomination, and HBO cancelled the series while a second season was being written. Warner Bros. then announced a solo film for her Black Canary, and no such film has reached the screen. She kept working through every one of those endings, and the work kept circling one subject: what it costs Black Americans to stand their ground inside a story someone else is writing.

That subject arrived early. She was born Jurnee Diana Smollett in New York City, the fourth of six children of Janet Harris, who is African American, and Joel Smollett, whose family came from Russia and Poland. All six siblings performed, among them her brothers Jussie and Jake. Before she was ten she had played Denise Frazer in Full House and Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper, starred alongside her siblings in the short-lived ABC sitcom On Our Own, and made her film debut in Francis Ford Coppola‘s Jack.

The role that set the terms came from Kasi Lemmons. In Eve’s Bayou, released in 1997, Smollett played Eve Batiste, a ten-year-old in a Louisiana Creole family who sees what her charming doctor father, played by Samuel L. Jackson, is hiding, and decides what to do with it. Smollett carried the film’s moral weight at an age when most child actors are cast for their timing, and she won the Critics’ Choice award for best young performer. Two NAACP Image Awards for the CBS sitcom Cosby followed.

The move into adult roles went through Denzel Washington. In The Great Debaters, in 2007, she played Samantha Booke, the only woman on the debate team of Wiley College, a historically Black college in 1930s Texas, a part loosely based on Henrietta Bell Wells. It won her the NAACP Image Award for outstanding actress in a motion picture. Television kept her busy for the next few years: Jess Merriweather, the East Dillon student who wants to coach football, in the last two seasons of Friday Night Lights, a run on CBS’s The Defenders, and the final two seasons of HBO’s True Blood.

The partnership that defines her came with Misha Green. In Underground, which premiered on WGN America in 2016, Smollett played Rosalee, a sheltered house slave on a Georgia plantation who joins the escape of seven runners known as the Macon 7. Its second season held a perfect approval score on Rotten Tomatoes. In May 2017 WGN cancelled it, at a moment when its parent company was being courted by Sinclair Broadcast Group, which fed speculation that the subject matter was the problem. Green and Smollett met again on Lovecraft Country, HBO’s adaptation of Matt Ruff’s novel, which premiered in August 2020. As Leti, a photographer who refuses to be frightened out of the places she has a right to be, Smollett was nominated for the Primetime Emmy for outstanding lead actress in a drama series and won a Critics Choice Super Award. On 2 July 2021 HBO announced there would be no second season.

The usual reading of this career is that Hollywood keeps failing to back a lead it has already seen deliver, and the cancellation record supports it. It is also incomplete. Smollett’s strongest screen work has run largely through one creative partner, and when that partnership stalls, so does her momentum. Green wrote Underground and Lovecraft Country, was hired to write the Black Canary film, and is set to direct her next feature. In Tinderbox, James Andrew Miller’s book on HBO, several of the show’s writers are quoted alleging that the Lovecraft Country cancellation followed a hostile work environment under Green. Outside that partnership the record is uneven. Tyler Perry‘s Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor, in which she had the lead, was panned by critics and grossed more than 53 million dollars. Birds of Prey, where her Dinah Lance sang in a nightclub before she ever threw a punch, drew good reviews and still fell short of its box-office break-even point.

Her answer since then has been to produce. She was an executive producer and co-lead with Allison Janney on Netflix‘s Lou, and an executive producer of Minhal Baig’s We Grown Now, set in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing project, where she plays Dolores, a mother holding a family together. She played opposite Chris Hemsworth and Miles Teller in Joseph Kosinski‘s Spiderhead, faced Jamie Foxx and Tommy Lee Jones as the opposing lawyer Mame Downes in Maggie Betts’s courtroom drama The Burial, and was the FBI agent Joanne Carney beside Jude Law in Justin Kurzel’s The Order, which competed for the Golden Lion at Venice in 2024. In June 2025 Apple TV+ premiered Smoke, Dennis Lehane’s arson drama, with Smollett as the detective Michelle Calderone opposite Taron Egerton. The Rotten Tomatoes critics’ consensus credited the show’s watchability to “commanding turns” from its two leads.

This year she has shifted register. In the premiere of Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, Larry David’s sketch series for HBO, which debuted on 26 June 2026, she played Rosa Parks on the Montgomery bus, improvising opposite David as a passenger who supports her refusal while explaining that he is simply too comfortable to move. Then, from 4 August, she made her Off-Broadway debut in The Whoopi Monologues, Lincoln Center Theater’s ensemble staging of Whoopi Goldberg’s solo show directed by Whitney White, taking over from Kerry Washington for the final weeks of a run scheduled to end on 30 August.

Smollett, who was born on 1 October 1986 and has just turned forty, married the musician Josiah Bell in 2010, and for years was billed as Jurnee Smollett-Bell; their son, Hunter, was born in 2016, and the divorce was finalised in 2021. She now works under her birth name. Her public cause predates her adult career: she has campaigned on HIV and AIDS since she was eleven, after a crew member on On Our Own died of the disease, working alongside the activist Hydeia Broadbent, and in 2020 she sat on the board of the Children’s Defense Fund.

What comes next brings the partnership back. Sunflower, the Lionsgate thriller Misha Green wrote and is set to direct as her first feature, casts Smollett and Isabel May as two women held on a remote farm by a professor played by Scott Speedman. No release date has been announced. When it arrives, it will show whether the collaboration that gave Smollett her best roles can now give her a film that stays on the screen.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Taron Egerton, Jurnee Smollett, Birds of Prey, Eve's Bayou

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