Jodie Turner-Smith did not have your typical pregnancy. The 34-year-old actress was in her second trimester of pregnancy while filming the new Amazon Original Movie, Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse, with Michael B. Jordan.
The strain of the action film made Turner-Smith concerned about the impact it was having on her unborn child.
“It was full on,” she told Cosmopolitan UK of filming. “I didn’t know at the time exactly how I would feel in my body at that stage. My lack of knowledge about the changes your body goes through… That all made it very challenging when you’re being very physical while growing a life inside of you.”
Turner-Smith and her husband, Joshua Jackson, welcomed their daughter, Janie, in April 2020. But before welcoming a healthy baby, Turner-Smith was worried about how the stress of filming was affecting her pregnancy.
“My husband was there for much of the time I was filming. I had a lot of hot baths,” she said of decompressing. “We rented an ultrasound machine and I would look at the baby almost every night. Because of how active I was doing an action film, I didn’t feel any movement until I was about 22 weeks [pregnant] so I spent a lot of time during my pregnancy really scared. So I needed to look at her to know everything was OK.”
Turner-Smith had to deal with all the typical physical struggles of growing a human being in addition to the demands of an action film.
“Everything is different – how you breathe, the temperature your body runs at. It’s a massive thing you’re undertaking already, so to add on top of that an extremely physical [acting] role. It was super challenging – I learned a lot about myself through that,” she shared.
Turner-Smith about her new action film recently, where she gushed about playing fully realized characters onscreen.
“It is extra meaningful for me to play a powerful Black woman onscreen and to have that to eventually show my daughter,” she dished.
