Jodie Turner-Smith responds to the backlash over her casting as Anne Boylen

Variety

“There are a lot of people that feel very passionately about not having a Black woman play a white queen,” Turner-Smith says of her role playing King Henry VIII's most famous wife in a British Channel 5 series. “It’s one thing when you’re playing a fictional character, but it’s another thing when you’re playing somebody who existed in history, and that makes people feel uncomfortable and upset.” Turner-Smith added that in theater, it's not unusual for actors of color to play white roles. "Hamilton’ is a really great example of how amazing it is when you just open up the space to tell a story with non-white actors,” she says. “It makes that story that much more relatable, because it just becomes a human story and a story for all of us. Not just a story for white people.” Despite the negativity, Turner-Smith says: "I hope that people will look at things with an open heart and an open mind. When they do, they’ll see that when we put characters of color in stories where we’ve typically only seen white people, it is not in some effort to erase white people, which is not possible.”