Janelle Monáe Takes The Spotlight On ‘Homecoming’
The ‘Dirty Computer’ singer and actor takes over for Julia Roberts in the popular Amazon Prime streaming series
When we meet Jackie in the very first episode of Homecoming, now in its second season on Amazon Prime Video, she doesn’t know who she is. All she knows is she woke up in a boat in the middle of the water and has no idea how she got there. Julia Roberts — who anchored the series’ first installment — portrayed caseworker/waitress Heidi Bergman, a woman caught in the throes of a clandestine government experiment on veterans. But now that Janelle Monáe is in this role, her intensity opens a brand new Pandora’s box of possibilities.
“I think [Janelle] has such a different presence as a performer and as an actress than Julia does, that it’s not even … about comparison, right?” Homecoming season two director Kyle Patrick Alvarez tells ZORA. “They inhabit their spaces differently.”
Monáe’s presence as Jackie, a completely new character in the psychological thriller that morphed from a podcast to the small screen in 2018, invites ideas and connections that presumably extend beyond the storyline initially conceived by the show’s white male creators. Jackie, as audiences discover, is not who she appears to be. At first, she is a military…
