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Jussie Smollett has spoken out in his first interview since telling authorities he was brutally attacked by two people in Chicago .
The Empire star talked with Robin Roberts for a segment that is set to air in full on Thursday on Good Morning America .
“I’m pissed off,” he told Roberts, before detailing his frustration towards those who haven’t believed his account of the assault.
“It’s the attackers, but it’s also the attacks,” he said.
“It’s like, you know, at first it was a thing of, ‘Listen if I tell the truth, then that’s it, because it’s the truth.’”
Best TV of 2018Show all 10 Best TV of 2018 10) Save Me Lennie James's missing-child thriller Save Me looked as though it might be a paint-by-numbers affair. Instead it was a gripping start to Sky Atlantic's impressive run, with James taking the lead as Nelly, the womanising bum who gains a new lease of investigative energy when his estranged daughter Jody vanishes. A smart script kept us guessing right up to an ending that denied us the closure we had expected. A second series has been commissioned.
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Best TV of 2018 9) Cunk on Britain How much you enjoyed Philomena Cunk's history of Britain depended on how funny you find Diane Morgan's resting confused face. I find it hilarious. Her interviewees are kind of in on the joke but clearly briefed to take it as seriously as possible. They’ll be mid-flow and she will cock her head and drain all the interest from her face. “What's the most political thing that's ever happened?” she asked Robert Peston, who did his best to answer with a straight face. Co-producer Charlie Brooker's fingerprints are everywhere in the way Morgan's vain, poorly informed, easily distracted Cunk operates within a ruthlessly satirical production, which sends up the tropes and cliches of every dodgy documentary and history programme. She might not be the comic creation we need, but she is the one we deserve right now.
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Best TV of 2018 8) Sally4Ever You either love Julia Davis or think her sick filth ought to be banned. Sally4Ever proved yet again that there is nobody working today – or at least nobody with the same platform – with a blacker sense of humour. Sally (Catherine Shepherd) was already surrounded by monsters: her loser of a boyfriend (Alex MacQueen) and tricky colleagues played by Julian Barratt and Felicity Montagu. Then Emma (Davis herself) arrived, a tornado of sex and bad intentions. Beneath the shagging, drugs, excrement, manipulation and malice were pockets of tenderness, but you had to look pretty hard to see them. Luckily there were also gales of laughter. N.b. If you have yet to see it, please do not watch it with your parents or children on Boxing Day and then write in to complain.
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Best TV of 2018 7) The Little Drummer Girl This was a spiritual successor rather than a sequel to The Night Manager. It was still a Le Carré adaptation on the BBC sprinkled with famous faces, but the differences were as pronounced as the similarities. Park Chan-Wook, the Korean auteur, directed with a high sense of style. Florence Pugh was dazzling as the ingenue actress Charlie, recruited for a dangerous mission across Europe, ably supported by Alexander Skarsgard and Michael Shannon as her spook handlers. Some viewers switched off after the first episodes, which took time to set the scene. They missed out on a vivid, beautifully told thriller.
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Best TV of 2018 6) A Very English Scandal Hugh Grant… can act? That was the first surprise in this smooth, stylish BBC retelling of the Jeremy Thorpe scandal. He burst convincingly out of the charming fop mould he has slept in so comfortably for thirty years. What have we been missing all this time? The other shock was remembering how recent it all was. The government is still up to a lot of nonsense, but the days of this kind of cover-up, for these reasons, is surely over. Or is it?
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Best TV of 2018 5) Patrick Melrose Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels have the kind of precisely drawn interiority that makes any kind of adaptation seem doomed to fail. Instead, the Sky Atlantic series brought them convincingly to life. It is not a happy tale. In flashback we saw Patrick's childhood in the shadow of his monstrous father David (Hugo Weaving), and the decades of self-loathing and substance abuse that followed. At the centre of all this was Benedict Cumberbatch, as good as he's ever been. His Patrick could be brilliant, witty, cruel and pitiful, sometimes in the same smack-addled sentence. Weaving, Jennifer Jason Leigh as David's wife Eleanor and Pip Torrens as his ghastly friend Nicholas Pratt all put in memorable performances, too.
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Best TV of 2018 4) Dynasties At an age where most of us are long past doing anything, David Attenborough is still changing our expectations of what a nature documentary can do. Like The Rolling Stones, he has been on his farewell tour since about 1970, but unlike Jagger & Co, the returns are not diminishing. Is he fuelled by anger at the world's response to climate change? Or simply driven by some massive internal dynamo, a soul-quest to improve our ability to relate to penguins? Whatever the motivation, Dynasties was wonderful, telling complex stories of the animal kingdom with beautiful photography.
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Rex Features
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He added: “Then it became a thing of, like, ‘Oh, how can you doubt that? How do you not believe that? It’s the truth.’
“And then it became a thing of, like, ‘Oh, it’s not necessarily that you don’t believe that this is the truth. You don’t even want to see the truth.’”
Smollett’s interview comes two weeks after police said a 36-year-old member of the Empire cast (who wasn’t named in the police statement but has been identified as Smollett) was attacked by two people at approximately 2am on Tuesday, 29 January.
According to police, the unknown offenders yelled racial and homophobic slurs at Smollett, then ”began to batter the victim with their hands about the face and poured an unknown chemical substance on the victim”.
“At some point during the incident, one of the offenders wrapped a rope around the victims neck. The offenders fled the scene,” the police statement adds.
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Try for free Authorities have said that Smollett told them the alleged assailants had yelled: “This is MAGA country.”
Smollett took himself to the hospital and was in “good condition”, according to authorities.
Support free-thinking journalism and attend Independent events The actor later said in a statement that he was OK, adding: ”My body is strong but my soul is stronger.”
Police have investigated the case but no arrests have been made.
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