With <i>Blink Twice</i>, Naomi Ackie Proves She’s Here to Stay (2024)

In 2021, Naomi Ackie almost sacrificed her smile for a part. It was the role of a lifetime: Ackie would be playing Whitney Houston in the musical biopic Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody, and she wanted to give it her all. She’d lost 30 pounds for the role (“I was starving, I was so hungry,” she remembers), and at one point, she seriously considered getting her teeth redone to erase her signature tooth gap.

It didn’t happen—the film’s choreographer and movement director, Polly Bennett, stepped in and told her that she had to draw a line between being Whitney on set and Nai, as she calls herself, outside of the work. But it’s a good example of the level of commitment Ackie brings to every part she plays. A true chameleon, she has the ability to fully and convincingly inhabit any character, as evidenced by the dynamic and diverse roles she’s been tapped for, from a housemaid in Victorian England to a resistance fighter in the Star Wars universe. What matters most to her is the process of creating, the art of it. Above all else, she’s a true actor’s actor.

On August 23, the 32-year-old Ackie will star in the darkly comedic thriller Blink Twice, and her formidable performance might finally catapult her to the next level—whether she’s ready for it or not. In the film, which marks Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut, Ackie portrays Frida, a brash co*cktail waitress who has always wanted more out of life. When tech billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum) invites her to vacation on his private island, Frida eagerly agrees to join, alongside her best friend and colleague Jess (Alia Shawcat). At first, the trip feels almost utopian. By day, they laze by the pool Slim Aarons–style; by night, they indulge in lush, locally sourced meals that devolve into drug-fueled bacchanalian celebrations. But when Frida begins to realize that things are not what they seem, she attempts to understand the sinister undercurrents at play—and, ultimately, to survive.

“When I read the script, I was like, this is about power, this is about control; I understood immediately. There was such clarity in the story and the archetypes that were being shown,” says Ackie. “But it was also funny. I love things that are dark and twisted but funny and different.” What’s more, Frida’s character seemed to navigate certain feelings that Ackie had seen in herself. Namely, “that feeling of I need more, I want more,” she says. “I was like, this was literally me when I was 25.”

That desire to level up, to constantly be in the vanguard, has been equally formative and corrosive to Ackie throughout her career. While she wants to be in a place where she doesn’t have to fight for every job, the lack of privacy and scrutiny that comes with that status, especially as a Black woman, is a double-edged sword. “When you’re determined and ambitious, you go, ‘I want to touch the stars.’ The biggest way of being told ‘Well done’ as an actor is by being famous,” explains Ackie. “But at the same time, I go, ‘Do I want that kind of fame?’ I don’t envy anyone who has that. I really don’t.”

Until 2015, she had worked exclusively in theater, but in 2016 was cast in her first feature film, the British period drama Lady Macbeth. Florence Pugh played the lead, Katherine Lester, while Ackie played Lester’s housemaid, Anna. “Anna stops speaking halfway through the film. There is all of this energy packed into this person that can’t be expressed. And that was what was fascinating to me,” she explains.

The movie was ultimately a hit, but while Pugh instantly became one of Hollywood’s most in-demand young actors, Ackie found herself struggling to clinch her next gig. “I was like, it’s a movie people like, so if people like it, then surely that is going to translate. And it did, but it just took longer,” she says. “I became a little bit more impatient and fearful about the security of this job as a potential future,” she says.

The period of stasis brought something else into sharp relief: the lack of substantial roles for Black women in major projects. “I realized that the space that there is for me isn’t as large, and that I would have to wait and potentially work harder and still not get where I wanted to be in my head. A lot of my frustration came out of the fear of going, ‘What if they don’t want me? What if there aren’t roles for me? What if I’m not capable of taking this any further?’ ”

Two years later, she was cast in Idris Elba’s directorial debut, Yardie. After that came what she thought would be her watershed moment: portraying a resistance warrior named Jannah in J.J. Abrams’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. “[Right before getting that role] I was near to quitting acting,” reveals Ackie, who, still living with her dad at the time, had recently decided to leave her part-time jobs as a hot dog vendor and barmaid to focus on auditioning full time. “[Getting cast] felt like a real message from the stars to keep going,” she says. “I was very much living my sci-fi fantasy nerd life. I was LARPing and getting paid for it. It was insane.”

Following Star Wars, Ackie moved into a shared house with fellow drama school mates. She was cast in a lead role in the hit British dark comedy-drama series The End of the F***ing World and received a British Academy Television Award for Best Supporting Actress for her work. From there, it felt like her rise was inevitable. She booked a lead role in the third season of Master of None, starring opposite Lena Waithe, and was tapped to audition for a Game of Thrones prequel and a Marvel movie. Then the Game of Thrones show ultimately got scrapped (she found out through Twitter) and days later, she was told the Marvel project had also fallen through. “I had to call my dad,” she says. “I remember being in a car like, ‘It’s just not going to work out for me. I think I need to stop.’ ”

Instead, she did the opposite, accepting the role as Whitney Houston. The film, like any biopic about a globally beloved figure, had the potential to make or break its star, but it did neither. Her performance was met with rave reviews, yes, but instead of making waves, the film made ripples. At the time, Ackie was devastated, but now, she sees it as somewhat of a cosmic intervention. “I look back now with hindsight and am like, ‘You handling that kind of attention? No, honey, that’s not for you,’ ” she says. “Do I want millions and millions and millions in the bank account? Of course I do. Do I want to own a home? Yes, I do. Two dozen. Do I want to be told I’m pretty all the time and be the face of some luxury brand? Yes. But also, is that as important as me loving myself exactly as I am without having to change anything or feel this pressure to appease this invisible f*cking judge and jury that we tend to have in our lives? No, it is not worth that.”

The line between wanting propulsive work and being fearful of what it could bring is one Ackie is continuously learning how to tread. She loves fashion (particularly kookier, more avant-garde designs) and has enjoyed attending various fashion shows as a guest of the brand, but, she explains, “I can still walk down the street with no makeup on, no one’s stopping me.”

Next up, Ackie will appear in Bong Joon-ho’s follow-up to his 2019 Best Picture winner Parasite, the sci-fi film Mickey 17, in 2025, as part of a star-packed cast including Robert Pattinson, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, and Mark Ruffalo. She also has aspirations to follow in Kravitz’s footsteps and write and direct her own films. “I want to get to a place where I go, ‘Okay, I’m ready to tell a story of my own,’ because we’re all just storytellers, really, aren’t we?” she says. Currently, Ackie is working on a pilot called Cash Pigs and is sitting on two other scripts, for a horror film and dark comedy, that she wrote during Covid. “Zoë has been such a huge inspiration for me,” says Ackie, who also hopes to one day start her own production company. “Watching this amazing actress become this incredible writer and director in real time, I’m like, maybe I can do this.”

Reflecting on her choices as an actor thus far, Ackie ultimately feels at peace. “When I look back on the work that I’ve done, there’s an elasticity about it, there’s a real contrast—and I’m proud of that,” she says. “I feel entitled to a variety of characters. I deserve that. And anyone who tries to typecast me or put me into a box, I’m like, ‘Well, f*ck you. That’s not going to happen.” She continues, “Maybe the whole theme of this whole thing is just trust. When it comes to my career, I’m like, it will be what it will be. I will find my way, whatever the way is, because it’s meant to be there. I’m in a space now where I’m like, I don’t change for the work, the work changes for me. I’m happy with that.”

Hair: Ali Pirzadeh for Björn Axén; makeup: Bea Sweet for Charlotte Tilbury; manicures: Julia Babbage; production: Block Productions; set design: Thomas Bird.