With her terrifyingly bold performance in Zoë Kravitz’s horror thriller Blink Twice, Naomi Ackie (Jannah in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker) is about to go from a face you know to a name you won’t forget.
It’s a dream project for an actress like Ackie, 34, a Londoner, and deeply cool, but the situation doesn’t come without its stakes. We convene for the first time at 7:30 a.m. on the day of the movie’s world premiere, in the lobby of her Beverly Hills hotel, and she is instantly candid about the anxiety she’s battling as she prepares to meet this moment. “I was trying to talk to myself on the plane, like, ‘I’m sure everyone is nervous,’ ” Ackie says. “I’m sure Chan and Zoë are nervous. I really do love the making of a thing, but I don’t think I handle the presentation of myself all that well. I’ve internalized this idea about what ‘movie stars’ should be like. They always seem so confident and look so polished. I start to feel self-conscious and slightly fake.”
She’s always wanted to be a movie star. As a kid, growing up in a suburb of London, she used to go into Leicester Square to watch red carpets, especially for the Harry Potter films. By high school, she decided she wanted to go to drama school. She was trying to figure out how she was going to pay for applications when she got a visit from Riz Ahmed. The actor had yet to become the star he is today — this was five years before his breakout role in Nightcrawler — but, as an alumnus of the Royal Central School for Speech and Drama, he wanted to encourage students to attend regardless of their financial needs.
Ahmed offered a free application voucher to anyone who wanted it, and Ackie, buoyed by the gesture, announced to one of her teachers that she was going to apply. “He looked at me, said, ‘It’s very hard to get into,’ and then turned and walked away,” Ackie recalls. She went straight to her mother to strategize, and then spent the next year devoting herself to becoming the best applicant possible. She signed on to her school’s musical, mentored kids at a local youth theater and got a part-time job working at another theater. And it worked. “I can get very cocky sometimes — I’m a Leo — and I remember going back into that college, to that same teacher, and getting to say to him, ‘Sir, I got into drama school,’ ” she says with a laugh. “And then I got to be the one to turn and walk away.”
She booked a few early roles on British TV shows — Doctor Who, the Harlan Coben mystery series The Five — and then in 2016 landed her first film, William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth. The production offered a shoestring budget, and Ackie (who was still living at her parents’ house at the time) roomed with co-star Florence Pugh in a shared cottage in the English countryside; but the two were young and green and found the sparse experience magical. “First and foremost, I was gobsmacked by the free food on set, and they would stock our kitchen,” she says, laughing. “We would sit on our back porch, and Florence would make us snacks — there’s this rice cake and pesto thing that I still make to this day — and we’d just wax lyrical about life. We were so young, so there were no expectations on us, no one to ask us, ‘What’s next?’ It was pure.”
A few years later, she co-starred in the comic book adaptation The End of the F***king World — which aired on Netflix to a niche yet dedicated audience and earned her a BAFTA in 2020 for best supporting actress — and played Jannah in Star Wars: Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker, the final installment of J.J. Abrams’ trilogy. She laughs now, thinking about the contrast to the scale of Macbeth. “I cried on the first day because I couldn’t get the horse to land in the right spot for a stunt,” she says.
On the advice of insiders, she deleted her Instagram before her Star Wars casting announcement went public. “I had heard that anyone of color would get wrapped up in some racist shit,” she says, referencing the horrific backlash that John Boyega endured after his 2017 casting announcement. “I didn’t want to have a place for them to come with their comments.” The resistance that she feared didn’t come to pass, and she eventually returned to the platform at the urging, and with the help, of Disney.
“They did some sort of magic thing where I instantly got the checkmark [verification] and all these followers, and then Star Wars came out, and it was fine and I sat with that for a bit. But then I eventually found myself scrolling too much, comparing myself to other people and becoming jealous, sad and depressed. I started putting stuff on my page that was attention-seeking. Trying to be funny on my Insta stories, or trying to be hot, trying to be a thirst trap from my fucking house share that I lived in with three other guys. It was like, what the fuck, this is not working at all and I don’t feel good about it. I eventually realized it was time to get rid of it properly.”
Read the article in full here, and see Blink Twice in cinemas now.
Image: Kurt Iswarienko at PMC Studios in L.A. on August 8th
