The tag model turned actor can be both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, producers are eager to get your pretty face (and large following) involved in their project. Then again, well… Hollywood is littered with the broken dreams of models who thought they could act. Jourdan Dunn, one of the most successful models of her generation, is determined not to be one of them.
I felt I owed it to myself,” she says over a cardboard cup of tea in a boardroom at ITV’s White City headquarters. ‘Acting is something I’ve always wanted to do, since I was a kid, long before I knew anything about fashion. At my grandmother’s house I always stood in front of the mirror and acted out different scenarios.’
She is now 32 and has her first real role in the ITV drama Riches, set in London. It is about a struggle for power between five siblings when their father, a business magnate, dies, leaving his empire to the least expected of his descendants. And it’s a fun, sexy, curvy six-piece, which is exactly what we all need in our lives right now. Dunn plays Davina, a small but pivotal role that allows a tantalizing glimpse of her acting skills. She is seductive, then vulnerable, then challenging. “She has the energy of the main character,” laughs Dunn, who holds her own against the show’s shining star, Deborah Ayorinde, who has starred in films as varied as Harriet and girls trip.
Today, Dunn is in “serious artist” attire of a black turtleneck with jeans and a black beret. While you expect a supermodel to be beautiful, it’s amazing how striking she is, with long braids, longer limbs and god-given cheekbones.
You might be wondering, if acting is what she’s always wanted to do, why did it take her until she was 30 to do it? The main reason is that it wasn’t until the pandemic that she had time to pause and assess where her career would take her now. Before then she was quite busy.
I felt like I owed it to myself. Acting is something I’ve always wanted to do, since I was a kid, long before I knew anything about fashion.
Dunn was famously scouted at Hammersmith Primark at 15, then walked for Prada and Valentino and starred in campaigns for Burberry, Yves Saint Laurent and Maybelline. In 2008, at the age of 18, she was Model of the Year at the British Fashion Awards. Other career highlights include appearing in not one but two Beyoncé videos. She was at her mother’s house when she got the call about that particular job. “It scared me,” she laughs. “I said to my mom, ‘All those years I practiced upstairs like I was the fourth member [of Destiny’s Child] are finally paying off!”’ The meeting with Bey did not disappoint. “One thing I learned from working with Beyoncé is how she makes everyone in the room feel,” says Dunn. “She knows everyone, she looks everyone in the eye, she says hello and goodbye to everyone. People want to feel seen and she gives them that.’
So barely time to take a breath, let alone contemplate her career, until the world grinds to a halt in the spring of 2020. “That’s when I started asking myself the big questions, like what is my purpose? The pandemic was the perfect time to take a deep dive,” she says. “I thought, you have this time. How are you going to use it?’
Dunn had become disillusioned with the fashion industry. “I was in a phase where I thought, This doesn’t feel meaningful to me anymore,” she says. “I feel like I’m not expressing the different parts of Jourdan. There’s so much more.’
After perfecting the actor’s art of talking about herself in the third person, she enrolled in classes at Identity School of Acting, which is also an agency, and which launched the careers of John Boyega and Letitia Wright. No one can say that she doesn’t take the process seriously and put in hours to learn it properly. And therapy has been a big part of this creative shift.
She had tried therapy in the past, but it didn’t work for her. “I was in the headspace of: No one can tell me about me,” she explains. “I’m an A* student when it comes to Jourdan Dunn.” But then she found a therapist who really understood her and helped her see things from a different perspective. Now Dunn says she’s “big at talking to my inner child” and, whenever she feels exhausted or disillusioned, she imagines what her childhood self would think of her life. “When I’m on set doing a TV show, or in Paris for a day… if you told me this would be my life, I would have thought, ‘Who cares? Not really. Me?” So it’s exciting to feel like I’m becoming the woman I always wanted to be.”
She also enjoys meditation, affirmations and diaries, she has been writing down her thoughts since she was 10. I wonder aloud if she would ever publish her diaries, and she doesn’t hesitate. “It’s great stuff,” she says, “it should be published.”
Born in Brent and raised in Greenford, Dunn is a West London girl through and through. Her mother, Dee, is her role model. She raised her daughter and two younger sons, Antoine and Kain, as a single parent – and supported Dunn when she became pregnant at age 18. Dunn has also been a single parent to her son, Riley.
“Seeing my mother, my grandmother, and my great-grandmother being independent was an inspiration to me,” she says. “Mom was a superwoman and I aspired to be too. Only now can I separate her from that superwoman mom role, Riley’s grandmother, and see her as just Dee, a woman. She did everything just because she had to, she was in survival mode. If she had a choice, she would have had more help. So I grew up wanting to be a Little Miss Independent: “I don’t need anyone’s help. I can do it alone.” But now I realize that we all need support sometimes and actually that’s okay. You don’t have to be superwoman.’
She lights up when she talks about her family, especially Riley. He turns 13 this month and she’s dealing with very relatable parental concerns about his social media use. “He’s on TikTok, but only recently, and I’ve been using the features to keep an eye on that,” she says. “But he’s asked for Twitter and Instagram and all those things. It’s so hard because I want to protect him, but I also have to trust him. He is not easily influenced, he is very informed.’
If I remove all politics – and there is always politics in any industry – I love fashion and I love what I get to do
He recently appeared on her own Instagram feed in a shoot for H&M, which he loved “because he got paid,” she laughs. ‘He is smart.’ Whether he will follow her into acting or modeling remains to be seen. “He doesn’t know what he wants yet,” she says. “We’ve had good conversations about it because even though he’s only 12, his friends all seem to know what they want, which puts pressure on him. I want to take that away by saying, no stress. There are people my age and older who are still figuring it out.”
Dunn seems in a good place and excited about the future. Despite previous headlines, she hasn’t “quit” the fashion industry yet, so we haven’t seen the last of her on the runway. “If I cut out all politics — and there’s always politics in any industry — I love fashion and I love what I get to do,” she says. “It will certainly always be a part of me.”
While there are no 2023 projects she can talk about yet (“I’m forever manifesting”), the future looks bright. She says she would love to act on stage and the big screen, citing Viola Davis as an inspiration. “I’m stepping into my goal,” she says firmly. ‘I step into the woman I want to be; the woman that little Jourdan would be proud of. I honor little JD.”
‘Riches’ will be available on ITVX on December 22, with all episodes streaming for free