Nao­mi Ack­ie: ​‘I know that feel­ing of want­i­ng some­thing that is just out of reach’

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 3^rd 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?

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.

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.