Jodie Turner-Smith shared her level-headed reaction to ex-husband Joshua Jackson’s romance with Lupita Nyong’o.
“Good for them,” Turner-Smith, 37, said in an interview with The Cut, published on Friday, June 14. “We need happiness in order to peacefully coparent. I’m trying to get us to the Gwyneth [Paltrow] and Chris Martin level. I truly hope they’re happy and that it benefits us as a family.”
Turner-Smith filed for divorce from Jackson, 46, in October 2023 after four years of marriage. (The couple share a daughter who was born in April 2020.) Nyong’o revealed that same month that she had split from ex-boyfriend Selema Masekela, whom she went public with in December 2022.
Us Weekly confirmed Jackson and Nyong’o were an item two months later. In February 2024, Nyong’o spoke briefly about her decision to keep her romantic relationship private.
“That was very, very sage of me. I’m going back to those days, by the way,” she said to Net-a-Porter at the time. “Our purpose in life is to love. And so you have to get back in it.”
Turner-Smith, for her part, shared a similar sentiment about putting her relationships in the public eye, including her relationship with her ex-husband.
“When you’re in the public eye, a part of you belongs to the public. It stops being yours and becomes theirs too,” Turner-Smith told The Cut. “I didn’t have an accurate scope of understanding what it would mean to share my relationship with the public. It’s something I will never do again. Ever. That is one major lesson that I took away from this, which is just that people don’t need to know everything.”
At the time of their split, a source exclusively told Us that Jackson had been “caught off guard” when Turner-Smith filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. “They had their issues, as many couples do — especially two busy actors who are also juggling a child,” the source shared.
“Joshua obviously didn’t realize it was this bad, that Jodie was this unhappy. Their friends are baffled and trying to understand how this came about.” Meanwhile, a second source told Us that the actress chose to dissolve her marriage because she “refused to settle for something that didn’t feel right.”
Tuner-Smith, for her part, still doesn’t consider her marriage to Jackson a “failure” despite filing for divorce.
“Sometimes things we really want to work just don’t end up working,” Turner-Smith told the U.K.’s The Times in February. “And that’s OK. The most important thing is that you choose what’s healthiest for you and your family and definitely your children.”
