Occasionally – not so often these days – a TV series properly hits home. It becomes a touchpoint, a cultural sign of the times, the sort of show that ends up on highlights of the decade or analysed in PhDs. Even more important: it’s loved. The characters exist in fans’ heads long after the show has ended.
Top Boy is one of those shows (so is Peaky Blinders, so is Sex Education); and it finished, after five series, in September (be warned: spoilers ahead!). So Jasmine Jobson, who from 2019 played Jaq, is, just for now, still defined by the series. For many, including me, Jaq – who ran the drugs scene when the big boys were away, who was tough and strategic and loyal – was the best character in the show, and Jobson gets stopped in the street all the time by fans. She doesn’t mind. “I absolutely adore Jaq, too,” she says. “It was so bittersweet to let her go.” She mostly drives when she has to get about in London now, though, just because it’s quicker: “Uber drivers want a photo,” she says.
We’re in her agent’s office, in central London, and we’re not here to talk about Top Boy. Though, of course, we do. In fact, I can wait no longer than five minutes into our conversation before I ask her my most pressing question. The final, shocking scene, where Sully is shot in his car… Did Jaq kill Sully?
“I can’t tell you that,” she laughs. “I have no idea. Everybody’s asking. I’m hearing so many conspiracy theories. I like hearing everything, but I’ve no idea.”
Hmm. I know what I think. Slight in her red tracksuit and Crocs, her hair piled on her head, Jobson has a calm, just-slightly-wary air that’s a long way from Jaq’s confrontational vibe. But she won’t be pushed. And, despite mine and the nation’s Top Boy love, she’s clearly moving along when it comes to her career. Next year, we’ll see her in Bird, the new film from Andrea Arnold, opposite Barry Keoghan; she’s also in the middle of filming a TV show that she’s not allowed to talk about.
Before we see those, though, there’s Platform 7, a four-part thriller that starts on ITVX 7 December. In it, Jobson plays Lisa, a teacher who, we realise a few scenes in, is not alive any more. Lisa is a ghost who’s stuck in the station where she died; soon, she makes friends with another person who dies there. At first, the show seems sweet, almost whimsical, but it swiftly changes, becoming a thriller (did Lisa jump in front of a train? Or did something else happen?), as well as an examination of a romantic relationship, plus there are some very funny scenes of ghostly scaring of the still-living.
Though dark themes are tackled, the series is also fun, and Jobson has to work through a wide emotional range. She enjoyed that. “As human beings, we’re onions, we’ve all got our own beautiful little layers. I really did try to bring that out with Lisa. So you definitely see her being a tough cookie, but at the same time you see her being vulnerable. Also, I was proud she was a teacher. I’m not a teacher, but I pride myself in being very caring, very loving, I like to give a hand to bring people up.” She loved making the show. Filming was in Leeds, last January, and she spent quite some time wandering about the freezing platform in her pyjamas. She wore a lot of thermals. “For a slim girl, I looked pretty thicc, and that I quite liked. So if anybody watches it and thinks, ‘Wow, Jasmine looks like she gained some weight,’ it’s all my thermals!”
And, no spoilers, but there are some serious underlying messages in Platform 7, which is very important to Jobson. “I’m all about telling real stories,” she says firmly.
Which of course, brings us back to Top Boy. There were those who thought the show’s unflinching depiction of inner-city black life was too gritty. But the whole point, says Jobson, was to shine a light on reality, help people understand why nice kids get involved in nasty situations. She joined the show when it moved from Channel 4 to Netflix in 2019; she was a huge fan before she even auditioned.
It’s an oft-told anecdote that in her final audition for the role of Jaq, the directors asked her to act out losing her temper. She asked how far she could go; they said: do whatever you want. So Jobson really went for it and threw a chair.
In other interviews, she’s said that the chair-chucking just happened and she could barely remember it afterwards, almost as though she had a blackout. But to me, she indicates that she was in control.
“It was strategic,” she says. “I asked, I didn’t want to be messing it up. I did my thing, but the main thing is that the chair went nowhere near them. I kept it completely away. I would never recommend anybody to just go wild and lose it in an audition… Then when I heard I got the job, I was washing my hair, and I remember flinging shampoo all over my bathroom, screaming my head off. A lot of throwing stuff about, yeah!”
Jobson gets emotional when she talks about Top Boy. She describes doing her final scene. “It was such a beautiful moment,” she says, her eyes filling with tears. “I’m very in touch with my emotions, as you can tell.” She makes me well up, too. “Ha! Clearly I’m amazing at what I do.”
Jobson learned a lot from her five years in the show, especially discipline and patience. Locations, schedules, scripts would suddenly change, and she and the other actors would have to forget what they thought they were doing and quickly learn whole new scenes. But the main thing she learned, she says, is teamwork. “Just to know it’s not all about you, you’re not on your own, we work together. I’ve always been very independent, I’ve always prided myself on being: ‘Oh I can do it, it’s fine.’ And it’s about learning how to be vulnerable as well. I was always raised to be a tough cookie and be very, very serious, you know? So learning how to be vulnerable was definitely a challenge for me.”
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Jobson’s independence and seeming invulnerability stem from her younger years. She grew up in London, mostly around the Harrow Road area, an expressive child, always singing. When she was four, “my mum caught me in my bedroom, standing in my mirror, fake-crying. And from then on, she was like: ‘That’s it. You’re a drama queen. You can cry on cue.’” Her mum put her into Paddington Arts, a performance group for younger kids; Jobson played biggish roles in her primary school (Mary in her year 1 nativity play, Romeo in a year 6 performance of Romeo and Juliet). She enjoyed her life. “I was doing singing, dancing and acting. I used to do Carnival, all the floats and stuff. I loved it.”
But things started to go askew when she went to secondary school. At a certain point, around year 8, social services moved her and her younger sister from her mum’s house, to live with their grandmother. Jobson didn’t like it. She kept getting great marks in her drama class, though, and did street dancing at a local youth club. “But I was very angry, and I wasn’t able to express myself properly. I wasn’t able to get my point across,” she says. She was hanging around with the wrong crowd, getting into fights, becoming involved in drugs. In the past, she’s said she was “a hood rat”, though she’s kinder to her younger self now. Still, at one point, she had the reputation of being “the most difficult child in Westminster”, according to social services.
“My behaviour was just deteriorating,” she says. “I wasn’t treating my nan right. I was coming home late, still in my school uniform, I used to run away whenever she was telling me no. Because I wanted to be with my mum. I just wasn’t being a very nice person. And I knew right and wrong, I knew what I was doing was wrong, but I was still doing it.”
The turning point came when her little sister started chatting back, too. “I said: ‘Don’t be disrespectful. Nan has asked you to do something, get up and do it.’ And she said: ‘Well you don’t do what she says, Jasmine.’”
Jobson knew something had to change, but she wasn’t sure what. She went to stay at a friend’s, but that didn’t work, so, bravely and cleverly, aged 14, she put herself into foster care. A woman called Valerie was assigned as her carer. Valerie lived in West Drayton, near Heathrow.
“I remember saying to the head teacher: ‘What do you mean, West Drayton? You never told me it was so far away!’” she says. “I wanted to back out, but it was too late. But then, when I got to the house, I remember sitting down and Valerie said to me: ‘So, you’re a teenager, I don’t expect you to sit in the house all day. Do you want to go and meet some of your friends?’ I couldn’t believe it.”
Valerie even asked her what time she wanted to come home. “And I was like: ‘Jesus, what is this? It’s a trick question.’ So I just thought I would be cheeky, so I was like: ‘Nine o’clock?’ And she was like: ‘Yeah, that’s fine. If you’re going to be later than that, then just text me and let me know.’ I was back in the house by 8:30pm.”
Jobson credits Valerie with changing her life: “Completely, completely.” She became good at timekeeping, her behaviour calmed down, she got her GCSEs, even though she was in a pupil referral unit (Valerie paid her £100 for every grade C and above). And Valerie helped her fight her battles. At one point, still in her teens, Jobson was trying to get a small, council-funded educational grant so she could pay for her profile in Spotlight, the actors database used by casting directors. They refused, and Valerie took it right to the top of the council. She won, and the profile was funded right up until Jobson got her Top Boy job.
But when she was 19, Valerie died, and social services took Jobson out of West Drayton and put her straight back in the area where she’d had problems. “Back in the shit,” she says. “You want me to progress in life, but you just put me headfirst back in the nonsense that kicked it all off to begin with.” Luckily, she had a good social worker, who helped. “She fought and fought and fought, and got me on the list of the four young people that get nominated for a flat every year in Westminster.” Jobson got a council flat, where she still lives. But soon after, the social worker was moved on. “She tried too hard for me, as far as they were concerned. She didn’t go by the book.”
Jobson has had a few totemic figures in her life, individuals who could see past the defiant behaviour to the person underneath. Valerie was one, as were her social worker and Matthew Blood at the council, who agreed to fund her Spotlight profile. Then there was Maggie Norris, who formed the theatre group The Big House, for children who had come out of care. Jobson performed in a Big House show, The Realness, and was signed by an agent within three weeks.
“It has been hard, don’t get me wrong. It’s been very, very hard,” she says. “But I’ve been very lucky that I’ve had people that have had my back. Not everybody gets that. And I wouldn’t be here without all of them.”
No wonder Jobson is hugely passionate when talking about troubled young people, and how they often aren’t served by the system that is supposed to support them. She uses “we” when we discuss it, because she’s still including herself. She still remembers how she felt when someone in authority cared for her, how much difference that made.
“Social workers do their job because they really want to help,” she says. “And it’s just heartbreaking that when you’ve got somebody that really wants to change your life for the better, they get pulled away because someone above says: ‘Oh, no, you’re doing too much.’ If they were allowed to treat young people how they’d like to, we all wouldn’t be feeling the way we feel – that they don’t care. Because by law, they’re our legal guardians, they’re our parents, essentially, for that moment. So why can’t they be allowed to care for us? Just that little bit, the way a parent should? Empathy. Empathy. That’s all we’re asking for.”
Jobson is in a happy place, these days. She’s close to her sisters; there are five of them, and she’s the second-oldest. “We’re very, very tight. We’re messaging all the time. There’s never a day that I don’t speak to my sisters or send them a meme.” She likes to work, she loves her home, her love life is good (she’s dating Kadeem Ramsay, who played Kit in Top Boy: “I’m just surprised that it’s news to everybody. Because it’s definitely not news! We’re happy, and that’s it”). And, even though she works hard, she still has time to go out: she went to the GQ Men of the Year awards with many of her Top Boy friends, and, last weekend, she was out-out, clubbing. “I actually jumped on stage with Lisa Maffia and Romeo at Garage Nation!” she laughs. “I saw them on stage. I was like: ‘Right, I’m getting up there.’ So I was able to shake a leg with them on stage!”
It’s great to see her fly, but it’s easy to see why Jobson is choosy about what she does. She’s going places, but she still wants her work to help others. “Yeah,” she says. “If I can change a perception and change a life, possibly save a life, in the process, then that’s what I’m doing my job for. I don’t see why I’m on TV for anything else, you know?”
Platform 7 will air on ITVX on Thursday 7 December
Photographer’s assistant: Ejatu Shaw. Styling by Sam Deaman. Hair and makeup: Kareem Jarché. Makeup assistant: Bridgette Mogridge. Jacket and trousers by Chanel, earrings and ring by Shaun Leane
