More than six years after leaving Fox’s Empire amid an uproar over an allegedly staged attack, Jussie Smollett is returning to the network.
Smollett will be part of the network’s competition show Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test in the fall. The actor and singer is one of 18 celebrities taking on a series of challenges that mirror those of military special forces training.
The season’s other contestants are Kody Brown (TLC’s Sister Wives), Brittany Cartwright (Bravo’s The Valley), Randall Cobb (former NFL player), Eric Decker (former NFL player), Jessie James Decker (country music artist), Andrew East (former NFL player), Shawn Johnson East (gold medal-winning Olympic gymnast), Mark Estes (“internet personality”), Gia Giudice, Teresa Giudice (The Real Housewives of New Jersey), Chanel Iman (model), Brianna LaPaglia (“internet personality” aka Brianna Chickenfry), Johnny Manziel (former Heisman Trophy winner and NFL player), Eva Marcille (model and actress), Ravi V. Patel (Fox’s Animal Control), Christie Pearce Rampone (World Cup winner with the U.S. women’s soccer team) and Nick Young (former NBA player).
The cast also features a few familial relationships: Eric and Jessie James Decker are married, as are Andrew East and Shawn Johnson East. Teresa and Gia Giudice are mother and daughter.
Smollett starred on Fox’s music-industry drama Empire for five seasons from 2015-19. In January 2019, he claimed he had been attacked in Chicago, where Empire filmed, by two Black men who shouted homophobic slurs. The two men then said Smollett paid them to stage the attack, and Smollett was charged with filing a false police report; the charges were later dropped after Smollett paid a fine and did community service. His character was written out of Empire’s final season, though he remained under contract with the series.
In 2020, however, he was re-indicted by a special prosecutor and convicted of five counts of felony disorderly conduct related to filing false reports in 2021. He served six days in jail before being released; the Illinois Supreme Court overturned his conviction in 2024, ruling that the second set of charges violated Smollett’s due process rights.
Smollett has maintained throughout the case that he did not stage the crime. He recently participated in a Netflix documentary titled The Truth About Jussie Smollett? that’s set to premiere Aug. 22 on the streamer.
Special Forces will premiere Sept. 25 on Fox.
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