For a film like Blink Twice, which opens on a close-up of a lizard, it is apt that its star Naomi Ackie is a chameleon. The classically-trained Londoner cut her teeth with a host of scene-stealing and idiosyncratic performances in Doctor Who and The End of The F**king World, winning a BAFTA for the latter. She followed those up as the star of the 3rd season of Master Of None, which played tribute to classic Ingmar Bergman, prior to disappearing into the title role of Kasi Lemmons’ biopic, Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody. In Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut she plays Frida, a struggling waitress and nail artist who is swept off her feet by the enigmatic tech mogul Slater King (Channing Tatum) only to discover that something is not right with this supposed escape to paradise.
LWLies: What was that clear to you on the page that this film was something really special?
Get more Little White Lies
Ackie: I remember when I was reading it I punched the air and was like, ‘Yes!’. You get this visceral gut thing. Reading the first draft, there was a clarity in it. It made sense to me, and that doesn’t always have to happen when finding your next project. There was a clarity in the character and in the story. And it’s only evolved since then, it’s only become better. Yeah man, me and Zoë watched it together and I wanted to, like, pick her up and just throw her across the room. It was so good.
With Zoë, I think people are going to make the comparison to when Jordan Peele stepped behind the camera and you’re just like… Where has this been? This is Zoë’s first film, and it has such a clear language.
It’s hard for me to tell sometimes because I’m not a film buff. I’m an actor, but I find it quite hard sometimes to be able to communicate why, in terms of how something is edited or lit, as to why it is good. But with this it was so clear – she’s playing with form and she’s playing with pace and made the world so immersive. I don’t how she and her editor did this, but all the way through I was gripping my chair. And I know what happens.
Even knowing what’s going to happen for you as a performer, is it taxing to spend so much of a shoot immersed in a sense of impending doom?
Yeah, but also, it’s really fun. There’s this thing about being Frida where it’s playing with her distraction, and her distraction is Slater King. So it’s like the moments where it feels like she could be going. ‘Hmm…’ her focus goes back to him because that’s the thing that she wants and he is like a blind spot to her. So it made each scene really dynamic because then you are playing into that inattention. I think I find it harder when I’m just playing a character that has one straightforward goal. This was exciting to play as every scene I was more looking forward to figuring out how we were going to make it work and that was more the tax it would take on me. It was also that my body hurt sometimes from rolling around on the floor in the Mexican sun.
Frida wishes she could unzip him from the back, climb into his body and wear it as a skin suit.
Sounds terrible.
Can’t complain. Though I suppose I just did so I’ll shut up.
What is Frida drawn to with a billionaire who looks like Channing Taum? Jokes aside, do you see what it is that she’s pulled in by?
I remember me and Zoë talking about this from the beginning. She wants to be with him, but she also wants to be him. It’s more than he’s rich and he’s good looking and he has a private island. It’s looking at someone and going, ‘Your influence is what I want, your power is what I want.’ That has a darker energy to it and we were trying to play with that. To be in the vicinity of power is to misguidedly feel like you’re also powerful. Having them be kind of on the opposite ends of the scale in terms of race and gender and resources means she’s looking at him and through him at the same time. Frida wishes she could unzip him from the back, climb into his body and wear it as a skin suit.
One of the things I think is genuinely powerful is you’re a very beautiful woman in a cast full of very beautiful women. But even though the film gets very dark, the black woman being in an alpha position felt quietly revolutionary to me.
It felt revolutionary at the time. It’s so funny about that because I have never identified as beautiful.
Wild.
Dude, I was thinking about this earlier. I never feel beautiful. I look in the mirror and I go, ‘Yeah, that’s doable. You look all right.’ So I’ve never accessed that part of me, and for Frida that’s perfect because she hasn’t accessed that part of herself either, but she’s trying to. And so, me trying to be her trying to be that desired thing also makes me question desirability in the first place. Because it is weird… Like, I love it and it does feel revolutionary, but also given the context of the film, you kind of don’t want it to be the case for her. Obviously, the film is the film and Zoë is a Black woman and wants it to be a black woman at the forefront. What I love most is that it’s revolutionary in that none of it is explicitly about race. There’s no moment where I’m like, ‘I’m a black woman!’ in the film. Which is really fun for me because. usually when it comes to the more of the conflict-y dramatic stuff, that’s something that you usually have to claim. Here it so happens to be a part of the story and if that speaks to you, amazing, and if it doesn’t, there are other things for other people to look at. But those people might not notice that, actually, race is as much a part of the story as anything else.
Now that you are further down the line, have there been conversations with Zoë at all about what she saw in your interpretation of Frida that made you perfect for the role?
I still don’t know. I didn’t audition for it. We just chatted but it was more that I think instantly we had this both the same understanding of what she was trying to say. I was so excited to talk about this script and I’m excited to talk about it now. It speaks to so many parts of my experience personally, and I know a lot of people’s experience. And so, we were talking from that angle. And what’s so nice is, in that first conversation, we’ve gone from like, ‘Hey, how are you?’ to talking about the themes of the script to me just being like, ‘Okay, so in this scene, this is how I’m thinking it would go.’ You naturally start to strategise and problem solve before you’ve even been offered the job. It felt really natural and sometimes when it comes to not auditioning for something, there’s this weird thing where you’re like, ‘You sure you made the right decision? Like, I don’t wanna fuck this up for you.’ Whereas this, I never felt that. I was confident that I could do this. I understood Frida.
Was there one particular scene that you discussed that conveyed that you really understood her?
It’s one of the smallest scenes right at the beginning. She’s waitressing and just putting all the dishes, the champagne glasses and stuff into the room and she’s staring at Slater King through the window in the door. And that kind of like, gazing up at something saying she’d break her neck to get to him. That feeling of just wanting something that is really close and just out of reach – I know that feeling. I used to work at the Almeida Theatre and I would be there on press nights going through with charcuterie boards for all the theatre people and I would look at like the actors and the actresses coming out afterwards and being celebrated and have an aching, desperate feeling.
How does it feel that you’re not just close now? You’ve been Whitney Houston, you have awards, you’re leading a truly stacked ensemble and following it up with a Bong Joon Ho movie. Do you feel you can stop as she says ‘breaking your neck’ to get to it?
In a way, yes. I still want more, but more doesn’t mean like a bigger cast and a bigger director, it just means more of that quality of work. The work gets me excited, but I guess in a way I do feel more chill because I reacted very well during the strike. I made it work for me. I took it as an advantage to live my life and I don’t think I could say I would do that five years ago. I would have been freaking out.
That’s such a massive thing, particularly for black women because there is a tendency to overburden yourself. The female Black Panthers used to say that self-care is a revolutionary act – to just accept when you need a little bit of time.
True, and it’s kind of crazy. I’ve just started my newest job doing The Thursday Murder Club, which is so lovely. I’m having so much fun. And it’s a completely different vibe, it’s a sweet comedy about murder. I mean it’s as sweet as you can get when the subject matter is murder. But it’s the first long job I’ve had since the strike. And I was saying to my boyfriend that if this is my only job for the year, I’m okay with that. And I’ve never been in that place but I am saying to myself, ‘Naomi you do not need to break your neck. You do not need to rush these things along.’
I mean look at Daniel Day-Lewis. You could take a break to go train as a cobbler in Florence like he did.
I want to be like Daniel. I want to be like one of those actors you see once every two years and, as I get older, once every five. To keep pushing, making great films. Get my nice little place with my nice little dog. Have a real chill life. Make great films. Bob’s your uncle, Fanny’s your aunt.
