Why Ellen Barkin's Janine 'Smurf' Cody Left Animal Kingdom

Being a woman in the entertainment industry has never exactly been easy, even if you're a successful actor with some star power. One might think that things have changed since the days when network executives wouldn't allow Loretta Swit to leave "M*A*S*H" back in the 1970s, but unfortunately, it appears the world hasn't progressed all that much. Case in point: As the star of the TNT series "Animal Kingdom," actor Ellen Barkin had to carry a lot on her shoulders, and she eventually wanted to step away from the show. Apparently, though, she was forced to stick it out much longer than she desired.

In a 2023 interview with the Huffington Post, Barkin revealed that she wanted out of playing her role as Janine "Smurf" Cody, the complicated matriarch of the Cody crime family, but she wasn't allowed to depart "Animal Kingdom" for several years. It seemed like Smurf was going to depart the show for a while when she was diagnosed with cancer in season 3, but it took another season for Barkin's character to be written out of the series entirely. (It was a bit of a fake-out, too, as she ended up being shot and killed by her grandson, J, played by Finn Cole.) 

"Animal Kingdom" is a pretty fierce little crime thriller series that relies on Barkin's badassery at its center, so it's understandable that the show's creatives didn't want to let her leave. Still, be that as it may, it doesn't justify the way they denied her agency to do so.

As Barkin explained to the Huffington Post, she had wanted to leave "Animal Kingdom" from almost the beginning. "I wanted out. They didn't kill me. I had been asking to leave for four years," she recalled. But where her co-star Scott Speedman, who played Smurf's adopted son Baz, was permitted to leave the show when he wanted to (in fact, Baz was written out courtesy of a hitman acting on Smurf's orders!), Barkin revealed that wasn't the case for her at first. In time, however, that changed, and the series killed off its murderous mama, continuing without her for two more seasons. Hence, Barkin was left with mixed feelings about the whole experience, calling her acting on the show "some of the best work I've ever done" while also admitting that "Animal Kingdom" "was not a pleasant place to work." 

While she didn't elaborate on exactly why she had wanted out of the show so much, Barkin did note that it rankled her when the series cast another actor (Leila George) to play a younger version of Smurf and then started relying on numerous flashbacks, giving her even less screen time: 

"Want to talk about treating women disrespectfully? On my show, there's a young me. Oh, what is that?"

Even after killing off Smurf and letting the woman who played her out of the series, the show's creatives continued to have George act in flashbacks, which must have only added insult to injury for Barkin. At least she finally got to leave "Animal Kingdom" and work on projects where she could really enjoy herself, including her guest spot as a killer actor — literally — on Rian Johnson's murder-mystery series "Poker Face." Smurf would approve.