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It’s pretty clear—what with him making the press rounds of late, and scoring a spot on the latest season of Fox’s reality series Special Forces—that Jussie Smollett is now formally operating in career rehabilitation mode. Inevitably, that’s going to involve talking about the 2019 incident that derailed the Empire star’s career, when he accused two unnamed men of assaulting him on a street in Chicago, putting a noose around his neck, and pouring bleach on him—only for Chicago police to come back and accuse him of fabricating the complaint. (Complete with two men who worked briefly on Empire coming forward to testify that Smollett had paid them to do it.) Smollett himself has been fairly adamant over the years that he was falsely convicted on the charges, which were ultimately dismissed in 2024, after a judge found that Smollett had already completed the conditions of an initial plea deal back before he was actually brought to trial. But he’s now going on the offensive in a recent Variety interview, in which he attacked the Chicago PD and former city mayor Rahm Emanuel, and drew some slightly odd parallels between himself and Michael Jackson.
Admittedly, you can, if you go looking for them, find some surface-level connections between the two men’s careers, given that both were the biggest stars in acting families where parents pushed multiple kids into going into entertainment. (Smollett is also a musician; he’s gearing up for the release of his second album, Break Out.) Even so, it’s a little wild to hear him declare that “homeboy Michael Jackson tried to warn us” on the topic of narratives being constructed around a public figure, given how heavily entrenched much of the story around Jackson remains in the public consciousness “I saw firsthand how narratives are built,” Smollett says in the Variety interview, in which he says very little about the actual attack while continuing to assert that he was framed by “villains” like Emanuel and the Chicago PD. “I saw firsthand the way that someone can take the exact opposite of who you are and literally sell it. And people will be like, ‘I believe it!’”
Besides drawing comparisons between himself and a far more popular pop culture figure who nevertheless participated at times in the very public immolation of his own public image, Smollett also mentioned briefly that he keeps in touch with at least some members of his former Empire family—Taraji P. Henson helped him make a film, B-Boy Blues, in 2021—including expressing some slightly rueful affection for Terrence Howard despite the Terrence Howard of it all. “We all have those family members who say things where you’re just like, ‘Just shut up,’” Smollett said when asked about Howard’s recent refusal to star in a Marvin Gaye biopic where he’d have to kiss another man. “I don’t like the way that he said it, but I understand what he was saying. There are roles that I could not commit to. And if he does believe that? Then I respect the man for being honest.”
Netflix’s new documentary about Smollett, The Truth About Jussie Smollett?—which the actor and musician was interviewed for—is due out on August 22.
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