Five years after Jussie Smollett‘s alleged hate crime hoax, Lee Daniels is open to working with the actor again.
The Academy Award nominee said that Smollett “was a son” to him after working together on his hit Fox series Empire, which ran for six seasons from 2015 to 2020, and Daniels would “work with him again.”
“I’d cast him in something,” said Daniels on iHeart Radio’s The Breakfast Club. “He was a son to me. And he also represented me. And he also represented the movement that I tried to start, which I didn’t know I was starting.
He added, “I was so busy, worried about Cookie’s hat and the music that we were playing [on Empire], this was before Insecure, this was before Black Panther. We started it. I was so worried about getting everything right that I didn’t know what was happening in the zeitgeist.”
After Smollett starred on Empire as Jamal Lyon, the gay middle son of hip-hop mogul Lucious Lyon (Terrence Howard) and Cookie Lyon (Taraji P. Henson), Daniels explained that he created the show after “experiencing so much homophobia” from Black people.
Terrence Howard, Trai Byers, Jussie Smollett and Bryshere Y. Gray on Empire. (Chuck Hodes/Fox/Courtesy Everett Collection)
In January 2019, Smollett claimed he was physically attacked outside his Chicago apartment building by two men hurling racist and homophobic slurs at him.
Following a police investigation that found the actor allegedly paid two work acquaintances to stage the assault, Smollett was found guilty on five felony counts and sentenced to 150 days in jail and 30 days probation in 2022. In December, an appeals court upheld the conviction.
“That whole situation was complicated,” said Daniels. “I still don’t know what to believe. Honestly, I don’t know what to believe. People say he didn’t do it, he did do it. God bless him on his journey.”
