My earliest memory is me at four years old doing roly-polies with my mum, dad and older brother in our living room in Peterborough. My brother ended up kicking me in the mouth. I cried so much. Getting kicked wasn’t great, but it reminds me how much fun I had with my parents.
Cléo from 5 to 7 by Agnès Varda is the movie that inspired me to be a filmmaker. I’ve watched it so many times. I’ve also watched Top Gun hundreds of times. Don’t judge me.
The success of people like Lupita Nyong’o and Michaela Coel has done so much to herald a change in beauty standards. Additionally, we are finally beginning to see more diversity in film, TV and advertising that represents a long- overdue broadening of the definition of beauty, femininity, and womanhood.
Women are powerful beings, yet we live in societies that tell us we are weak and inferior, that we are not permitted agency over our bodies, that we deserve less. It is vital that we fight against this.
Feeling beautiful is something I’ve definitely had to grow into. I acted as though I was unaffected by what other people said. Eventually I began to feel unaffected by what people were saying – and then began to be perceived differently.
I don’t get starstruck, but I saw Grace Jones, who I admire so much and felt so shy. My husband was like, “Babe, just go and talk to her.” In the end I did. We ended up doing much more dancing than talking, though at one point I said: “Grace you’re from Spanish Town [Jamaica], that’s where my mum is from.” She replied: ‘We could be related, we could be sisters!” And I thought, “Yep, I’ll take that.”
If you asked my mother, she would probably tell you that my worst habit is that I’m really slow and it takes me a long time to do anything. She’s right, but the reason I take so long is that I pay a lot of attention to detail. So I’d like to think I’m just thorough – and that takes time.
Mum taught us all to cook from a young age. By the age of eight, she’d have me hand over all the seasonings while she was cooking and that’s how I learned to cook. Jerk chicken was always my favourite, it’s my signature dish.
A lot of times the stuff most scary to us is the thing not actually happening in the moment. It’s usually something that has happened in the past or fear about the future. I find it’s best to stay in the moment and all that fear fades a way.
If the racial issues didn’t exist I’d love to go back to the 60s and 70s. I would have loved to party at Studio 54 with Andy Warhol and the Stones. I also wish I could have been at Woodstock. It’s always sad not to experience certain musicians live in your own lifetime, like Jimi Hendrix. I am obsessed with him.
Jodie Turner-Smith is the face of Gucci Bloom Profumo di Fiori, available at Selfridges
