TV INTERVIEW: JADA PINKETT-SMITH

Entering A Second Season as a Registered Nurse on TNT's HawthoRNe

By: Parimal M. Rohit

June 21, 2010

Hollywood actress Jada Pinkett-Smith has always been known to be sexy, confident, independent, and headstrong while maintaining her sweet, natural, lady-like tendencies. Whether it be the spunky diva Peaches in A Low Down Dirty Shame, the strong and poised rebel Niobe in The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, the rambunctiously loud voice of Gloria in Madagascar, or the pleasantly upright Calra Purty in The Nutty Professor, Jada has been as much an alpha personality on-screen as she has been off-screen. Considering how much Jada’s personal and professional lives overlap, it comes as no surprise to the 38-year-old actress that she would fall in love with the script of the TNT original series HawthoRNe — a medically themed cable program that is set in Richmond, Virginia and co-stars Michael Vartan and Suleka Mathew. On the heals of the second season premiere, Jada sat down with Buzzine and delved into how much she related to HawthoRNe’s lead character — the inner city-based registered nurse known as Christina Hawthorne.

“It mirrored a very familiar part of my own life,” she recalled. “My mother was a nurse. She was the head nurse of this inner-city women’s clinic for many years and she raised me as a single parent. I just felt like the show had a lot of heart, and I felt like it was an opportunity for me to pay homage to all the wonderful nurses I had come across, (as well as) my mother. I just had a lot of affinity for the project.”

In Jada’s eyes, it also helped that TNT lent its production support behind the original cable series, mostly because she believes the network’s backing is a testament to the promotion of women actors: “I wanted to be in partnership with TNT because they were focusing on creating very strong leading roles for women in television shows,” she humbly said. “I think, in Hollywood in general right now, leading roles for women are a very difficult thing, and I feel as though, as far as roles for women and roles for African-American women, there’s always room. We … still need a lot of work in that area.”

But it’s not just TNT who is at the forefront of creating opportunities for women or anyone else who aspires to succeed. Jada herself aims to be a difference-maker, parlaying her visibility and stature in Hollywood to promote hard-working, independently minded people who simply need a door or two opened for them to flourish: “One of my main goals is…I always like to create a space where people understand that they’re individuals to be defined by their own rules. That’s always been my broad statement in everything I have done and will continue to do in this industry, especially in an industry where people try to put you in your little category: ‘Oh, well you’re African-American female, and African-American females do this.’ Throughout my whole career, I’ve always tried to step out of the box a bit.”

However, one person who is not stepping out of the box is Christina Hawthorne. In the second season of HawthoRNe, Jada reveals that Christina will endure a new set of struggles as she and her team transfer to a new hospital.

Specifically, despite the character’s stubbornness and independence, Christina finds, in the second season, that the more she tries to maintain control and hold her ground, the more things go against her will, ergo placing her in compromising situations: “This year, it’s all about Christina surrendering. She is going to have to surrender. Last year, she was so in control and so stern and strong. And she was always right,” Jada candidly said about what HawthoRNe fans should expect about Christina in the show’s second season.

“This year is going to be a little different. She’s going to have very high stakes in her personal life in which she’s going to have to really make some hardcore strong decisions.”

Among some of those “hardcore strong decisions” Christina has to face during the second season of HawthorRNe are the character’s struggles in learning how to coexist with others:  “This year, she is going to learn to work with people, versus rolling over people and working around people. She cannot do that in this hospital this year, so she has to take a much different attitude as far as how she deals with her staff and the people she’s working with. You’re going to see a Christina who is going to fight tooth-and-nail to … keep … her control but eventually is going to have to let go and give in.”

But one thing Jada is happy to give in to is what she believes is the ultimate message of HawthoRNe, which is the latest in a string of cable and network original series focused on what is considered one of the world’s noblest of professions — the practice of medicine and human healing through science: “When you see people who are putting forth a lot of energy to help other people, to me, it’s kind of what part of the old classic American ideal is — how each brother and each sister will help as a community — we just help each other live. So to see someone as passionate as our team at James River, to have people on a daily basis that are risking so much for our main character, especially Christina risking so much for others…I think you just don’t see that a lot anymore.”

Perhaps Jada is on to something, but then again, beginning June 22nd, if anyone really wants to witness human charity in action, all they have to do is watch Mrs. Pinkett-Smith do her thing each Tuesday night on TNT’s original series in HawthoRNe, which jump-starts its second season on Tuesday at 9pm EST/PST.