ALPHA
MAGAZINE
Jussie Smollett: A Candid Conversation on Directing, Acting, and Mental Health in the Black Community
written by
CLINT PORTE
“Those are your people,” Jussie Smollett says, his voice steady, almost relieved, as if he’s arrived at a truth he spent years circling. “I used to pray for humility all the time. Now I pray for discernment. Once you recognize you only need relationships where there is no ego in it, where there is no competition in it… those are your people.”
In his mid-thirties, Smollett speaks with the clarity of a man who has lived several public lives and survived them all. The child actor who once moved through Hollywood sets with wide-eyed ease, the young star who found global recognition on Empire, the artist who endured scrutiny and exile in equal measure, has reemerged with “The Lost Holliday”, a film he directs and anchors with a kind of emotional precision that feels less like performance and more like testimony.
The film begins with grief but refuses to stay there. Vivica A. Fox plays an estranged mother who travels to Los Angeles to bury her son, only to discover a life she never knew he lived, including the husband he left behind. The premise is intimate, almost claustrophobic, but Smollett widens it into something more expansive, a meditation on family as a choice rather than a given.
He lights up when he talks about Fox. “I already knew what it was like to know her and to love her and to work with her,” he says, smiling at the memory. “But I had never had a real scene with her. She’s one of the most powerful scene partners that I have ever had.” Their history stretches back to his childhood, their families orbiting each other through sets and soundstages, until the connection became something permanent. On screen, that familiarity translates into a gravity that pulls every scene toward truth.
If Fox provides the film’s backbone, its pulse is carried in quieter moments, especially in scenes with young actress Londyn Carter.
Smollett admits those were the hardest days. “I was not supposed to be emotional during those scenes,” he says. “But I found myself getting choked up.” Looking into her eyes, he wasn’t just acting. He was confronting the reality of how grief settles into children, how it lingers in questions they’re too young to articulate.
For Smollett, surrounding himself with people he loves was not indulgence. The set became an extension of the film’s thesis: that healing happens in proximity, in the presence of those who see you clearly and stay anyway. “You look back behind your shoulder and you realize that you weren’t alone at all,” he says. “That the people that were there, that’s your community.”
That sense of community extends beyond the frame into the film’s most urgent concern: the mental health of Black boys and men. Smollett speaks about it without rhetoric, only urgency. “How do you tell somebody that you need help when they simply think that you shouldn’t? What do you do? Who do you talk to?” he asks, not rhetorically but as if still searching for better answers.
“The idea that there’s only one way to be a man, let alone a Black man in this country, is something that’s choking us,” he continues. “What I’m grateful for is that we’re starting to talk about all the different layers and nuances that go along with this, that we should’ve never been ashamed to talk about to begin with.” He pauses, then adds with a knowing half-smile, “We’ve always expressed it within our own communities. But it becomes really difficult when the community becomes bigger. Remember when your mom used to say, ‘We don’t talk about that in mixed company?’ Well, what does that mean now? There’s no place to go where it’s not mixed company.”
In The Lost Holliday, those questions live inside the characters rather than hovering above them. A husband mourning a partner. A mother reckoning with the life she missed. A child absorbing the emotional weather of the adults around her. Smollett resists easy resolutions, choosing instead to let vulnerability stand as its own form of strength.
“Who’s there to tell you that you’re okay as you are,” he asks, “if the very people who are supposed to be telling you that don’t believe that you are okay as you are?” He frames the question broadly, touching education, faith, sexuality, race, the silent rules that shape identity long before we have language to challenge them.
For Smollett, storytelling is about communal ownership. “What I want anybody to take away from watching me is ownership,” he says. “Especially over the years, it has been my fear of rejection that pushed me to work at it even if I had to do it alone.” He stops, then corrects himself gently. “And then you realize you weren’t alone at all.”
He speaks often about acknowledging when something isn’t right, including within himself. “To me, that is my strength,” he says. “Being able to acknowledge when something is not right, but more importantly, when I’m not right. Staying true to yourself and not looking at yourself through the eyes of other people.” It’s a philosophy that extends beyond the film into his advocacy, his
insistence on making space for conversations that many still avoid. He talks about young Black boys as if he knows them personally, as if he remembers being one and still carries that boy with him. “It’s important to me to give back to the community that has shaped me,” he says. “I want to use my platform to uplift others and ensure that young Black boys know they are not alone in their struggles.”
By the time our conversation ends, The Lost Holliday feels less like a project. Not a comeback, not a reinvention, but a continuation shaped by hard-earned clarity. Smollett does not speak in the language of redemption. He speaks in the language of responsibility.
If the film resonates, he tells me, it will not be because it solved anything. It will be because it opened a door.
“If we can start conversations and inspire change,” he says, “then I’ll consider this a success.”
He pauses, then returns to the thought that began our conversation, the one he seems to be living inside now.
Those are your people.
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