The Smollett Family Is Back!
08/06/2020
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Lovecraft Country is an upcoming HBO horror series (starring Jurnee Smollett, sister of Jussie Smollett) that reveals the true secret behind H.P. Lovecraft’s concept of unimaginable “cosmic evil.” You’ll never guess, but it turns out the most horrible evil in the universe is … White Supremacy!

From the Hollywood Reporter:

In the fraught, sweaty days following the police killing of George Floyd, Jurnee Smollett has been working through a battery of emotions: There was profound grief, then fear, anxiety and, now, rage.

“Oh, the rage,” she howls, “the rage I feel in my body.”

Smollett’s gotten awfully good at channeling that rage, she says, convening with Black Lives Matter allies in church basements and Los Angeles streets whenever she can steal time away from her 3-year-old son, Hunter, for whom she doesn’t currently have regular childcare. Still, she can feel it now, coursing through her veins, as memories the actress has tried so hard to bury come flooding back. The soda cans hurled at her. The cop cars she was thrust into. The dead fish placed on her family’s lawn.

If it were not for the pandemic ravaging her city, Smollett would be taking Hunter with her, just as her mother once did her. During the Rodney King riots of ’92, Janet Smollett had her children out in the street, holding up signs. Jurnee was just 5 at the time.

… When Smollett’s latest project, HBO’s Lovecraft Country, a highly anticipated horror, sci-fi, period mashup that revisits the atrocities of Jim Crow America, makes its debut Aug. 16, it will inevitably be trumpeted for its timeliness. The notion infuriates its star. “We’re telling the story of heroes that go on a quest to disrupt white supremacy, and it’s maddening that in the year 2020 it’s still relevant,” she says, adding that the series, from Jordan Peele, J.J. Abrams and Underground’s Misha Green, would be so had it come out on any day of any year since 1619 — which is not to suggest Smollett isn’t immensely proud of the project, or ecstatic about the splash it’s expected to make.

… her star has been eclipsed by that of her brother, Jussie, the embattled Empire alum who was accused of staging his own hate crime in early 2019 and then lying about it to the cops. The case is still winding its way through the legal system, but Smollett, agreeing to address the incident for the first time publicly, maintains her brother’s innocence.

… Before their mid-1990s divorce, Smollett’s father, a Russian-Polish Jew who passed away a few years ago, often worked two jobs, while her mom, a Black homemaker from New Orleans, was looking after the six kids.

… With the legal case ongoing — prosecutors dropped all charges against the actor in March 2019, only to have a grand jury revive the criminal case 11 months later — Smollett is limited in what she can say. What she does offer is how “maddening” it is for someone so outspoken to be told she “can’t talk,” and how horrific the whole ordeal has been for her fiercely close family. Still, Smollett insists her defense of her brother has not impacted her professionally, arguing instead that she has felt supported. “We are blessed to have a community of people who know him,” she says, “and know that he wouldn’t do this.”

iSteve commenter Wren points out that in some comic book movie recently:

Jurnee’s superpower in the movie is the ability to scream in rage.

She can knock people off their feet with her ability to scream in rage at all the soda and fish and having to play a white character.


[Comment at Unz.com]

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