Jussie Smollett Hopes Special Forces Will Be a 'Great Kind of Reset' 6 Years After Alleged Hate Crime (Exclusive) By Stephanie Wenger

Jussie Smollett is ready for viewers to see a different side of himself on Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test six years after his alleged hate crime hoax.

The Empire alum, 43, recently spoke with PEOPLE alongside his castmate Eva Marcille at the Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test red carpet event in Los Angeles, where he opened up about how the Fox competition series allowed him to “talk to the public in ways that I didn’t even think of, going into it.”

His decision to take part in the show’s fourth season, which premieres on Sept. 25, was simply about “young people.”

“It was really about my nieces and nephew and all of the young people out there showing them that you get knocked down, you get back up, you get knocked down, you get back up,” he explains. 

Smollett — who is releasing his new album Breakout on Sept. 30 — calls his experience on Special Forces “very sobering,” adding, “It’s not always easy to be vulnerable… And again, the physicality of this, again, we’re not athletes, but we’re athletic. So it’s different. It’s very intense.”

“But to me, the most difficult thing was the mental,” he says of the show, which sees a group of celebrities shipped off to another country to participate in various challenges that mimic military training. “And so that, and getting through that was really special.”

“So I hope that it’s the great equalizer and it’s also the great kind of reset of this is who I am and it’s all love,” he concludes.

Marcille, 40, also teases that fans will get to see the true Smollett on the series as he “hasn’t done unscripted” before joining the reality show.

“A lot of what you see is his emotion through his music and so you assume who he is through that, you know his activism and then you also know him as an amazing actor,” she tells PEOPLE. “I don’t think anyone outside of his family and his close friends, his fiancé [Jabari Redd], truly has the opportunity to see who Jesse really is until you watch this show.”

The Real Housewives of Atlanta alum notes that Smollett was “a man stripped of all of the pleasantries and luxuries of life, put in the most insane situations and you forget there’s a cameras there, you forget there’s a mic there and you have to get through it and you can tell who this man is by the way he chooses to get through the tough times.”

“And that’s what you get to. That’s what I see,” she adds. “That’s what I learned and that’s what I think that the world is going to see.”

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Smollett’s turn on reality TV comes six years after the actor reported that he was the victim of an alleged hate crime in 2019. Smollett, who is gay and Black, claimed that two men had attacked him while yelling racist and homophobic slurs outside of his apartment building in Chicago.

Following the investigation into the incident, Smollett faced charges of filing a false police report and allegedly hiring former Empire extras, Abimbola “Bola” and Olabinjo “Ola” Osundairo, to stage the hate crime.

After a back-and-forth in which Smollett was charged and cleared twice, the court proceedings and lawsuits were resolved with the actor’s convictions being overturned by the state. The city then pursued a lawsuit against Smollett in an attempt to regain money spent on the investigation.

Smollett reached a settlement with the city of Chicago in May and agreed to make a $50,000 charitable donation in exchange for the lawsuit being dropped. 

In August, the actor opened up about the long-lasting impact of the incident, telling Variety, “I’m still insecure when I meet people for the first time.”

“I don’t know if they are coming into the room thinking that I’m this trash person who did something that I didn’t do, or if they are thinking that I am this good person who got a raw deal,” he shared at the time.

Smollett added that he often wonders if people he meets are “not thinking anything,” noting that he “would rather the latter.”

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Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test season 4 premieres Thursday, Sept. 25 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Fox.