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Jodie Turner-Smith Says It's a 'Big Job' to Raise a Daughter Who Has a 'Level of Privilege'

Jodie Turner-Smith and husband Joshua Jackson share daughter Janie, who turns 3 next month

ELLE UK/Petros
ELLE UK/Petros

Jodie Turner-Smith is realistic about the differences between her upbringing and her daughter's.

Speaking with ELLE UK about daughter Janie, who turns 3 next month, the Murder Mystery 2 actress, 36, said, "I love this little girl so much. She's so funny."

Reflecting on motherhood, Turner-Smith acknowledges, "It's a big job to prepare children for the world. The best thing that we can do is let them touch the earth and be grounded and real."

In being real, she also touches on her daughter's unique experience, adding it's "as real as one can be when you have the level of privilege that obviously my child has."

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ELLE UK/Petros
ELLE UK/Petros

Related:Jodie Turner-Smith Says She and Joshua Jackson Are '100% Going to Play' 'Mighty Ducks' for Their Daughter

The actress jokes, "I'm not acting like she's not a nepo baby. But I worked damn hard to have a nepo baby!"

Elsewhere in the interview, Turner-Smith talks about how Janie will have a "completely different experience" than either of her parents because she is both Black and white.

"She is going to have a completely different experience in the world than I did, because I have given birth to a mixed-race girl," Turner-Smith tells the outlet.

"It's interesting because I had a lot of resistance to becoming a mother and, throughout my life, I always said if I were to have children, I wanted to have Black, Black babies so that I could affirm them as children with the love that I felt I needed to have been affirmed with by the outside world," she continues.

ELLE UK/Petros
ELLE UK/Petros

When Turner-Smith fell in love with the Dr. Death actor, 44, she says she realized "to decide not to have a child with somebody you love, just because they're white, was insane to me."

"But, at the same time, I did have this mini pause, where I was like, 'She's going to be walking through the world not only having an experience that I did not have, but looking like people that, in a way, I'd always felt a little bit tormented by,'" Turner-Smith acknowledges.

"Now that I've got this little, tiny, light-skinned boss, I feel like it's the universe teaching me lessons. I've been given a daughter who looks this way to heal my own conversations around colourism."

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