Who’s Afraid of Naomi Ackie? Meet Hollywood’s New Femme Fatale

There’s a moment from the filming of Blink Twice that Zoë Kravitz can’t get out of her head. It was the middle of the night, during a scene that called for her star Naomi Ackie to lie on the ground in the dirt, restrained while another character holds a gun to her head. They were trying to line up the shot just right, and it had been hours since Ackie had eaten; Kravitz, the movie’s director, wanted to break to let her rest and have a snack. “But she was like, ‘It’s all right, babe, just hand me the sandwich,’ ” she recalls. “I took a picture of it because it was so incredible. She’s got one hand behind her back, there’s the gun to her head, and she’s just in the dirt eating her sandwich with the other hand with a smile on her face.”

How — and whether — you are currently familiar with Ackie will depend on your viewing habits. Some first noticed her in Netflix’s The End of the F***ing World, others remember her poignant turn on Master of None’s third season or her starring role in 2022’s Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody. But she is, without question, entering the biggest moment of her career. Blink Twice is already a hotly anticipated movie thanks to its A-list director (it’s Kravitz’s first time behind the camera) and the fact that she cast her now-fiancé, Channing Tatum, as the movie’s villain, an egotistical and sadistic billionaire who is sure to shock those who prefer him as a charming, often dancing, romantic lead. But it’s Ackie’s raw and fearless performance, as a cater waiter who charms her way into an invitation to the billionaire’s private island before discovering it to be her worst nightmare, that will soon define her career. 

And believe this: Everyone who sees Blink Twice will be talking about it. The psychological thriller, sort of a Get Out meets Promising Young Woman, places itself directly into The Discourse — it’s social satire plus class warfare plus gender politics, all packaged up in an internet-savvy, millennial-friendly way (marketing includes custom-made lighters and pre-rolls splashed with the movie’s signature visuals). It comes out at the end of a summer that saw tentpoles like Deadpool & Wolverine and Twisters overperforming at the box office but remains hard-up for projects that dominate the cultural conversation in a real way. The last to break through the crowded social media space was the last release from Blink Twice backers MGM: Zendaya’s Challengers. 

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.” 

Two years later, she joined the cast of Master of None for its long-delayed third season, which featured a creative departure that placed star-creator Aziz Ansari’s Dev in the background, allowing him the time and space to direct each episode. Ackie put herself on tape for the role of Alicia, who begins as the wife of Lena Waithe’s Denise before claiming the season’s most poignant screen time as she endures a miscarriage, divorce and ultimately a solo IVF journey. Ansari was intrigued by her audition footage, but it wasn’t until they brought her to London for a chemistry read with Waithe that he felt the full force of her talent. “After her first couple reads, I told her to just try it as herself, and with her own British accent,” he tells THR. “It blew open, and her personality came right through. Lena is such a force as an improviser that we needed someone who could hold her own, and Naomi could. We knew she was the person to help us carry the season.” 

The work was more complex than anything she’d done so far. Ackie was 29, and taking on the emotional heft of fertility struggles that still felt, relievedly, far from her own reality. “I just thought, OK, that’s interesting to know, but that’s a problem for someone else in the future,” she says of her reaction to her 37-year-old character’s diminishing fertility. She’s four years closer to her character’s age now but still “not ready to have my own child until I’m probably like 40,” she says with a laugh. I mention how easy it is to wake up one day in a stranglehold of biological desire you didn’t realize you were capable of. “That’s actually good to know,” she muses. “That one day you can just look at a baby and think, ‘I want you.’ I know it’s bad the longer you wait, but I feel really intentional about wanting to be married for a few years before that happens. And I don’t own a home. I can’t even look after a fucking plant, mate. And can I keep my house tidy? No. I didn’t even make my bed before I left for L.A.” 

***

In Blink Twice, which Kravitz wrote alongside High Fidelity series writer E.T. Feigenbaum, Ackie plays Frida, an aspiring nail artist who works as a cater waiter to pay the bills. The film opens as she prepares for a gig at a gala honoring Slater King, a bad-boy tech billionaire who is rehabbing his image in the wake of a vague public scandal with an apology tour and the launch of a charitable foundation. We see through her search history that Frida is captivated by King, that he represents all of the cultural currency (wealth, power, masculinity, whiteness) that is out of her reach. Compelled by a desire that feels innate, she plots her way into conversation with King, eventually earning an invite — alongside her roommate, played by Alia Shawkat — to the private island he’s been using as a hideout. The trip starts out as a luxurious bacchanal, with a glittering swimming pool and endless champagne and nightly multicourse meals topped off by communal hallucinogenic trips, before a feeling deep in the pit of Frida’s stomach becomes too much of a warning sign to ignore.

When Kravitz was casting for the role of Frida, she knew she wanted someone with an expressive face first and foremost; the character is both an unreliable narrator and an audience surrogate, and viewers follow along as her starstruck joy in front of Slater King turns into trepidation and worse. After watching The End of the F***ing World and Master of None, Kravitz sent her the script and asked for a Zoom meeting. “I got an email that said Zoë Kravitz is interested in you, so I’m paying attention,” Ackie says. “And then the film is called Pussy Island? And she wrote it? I’m like, ‘OK, what do I have to do to get the part?’ ”

There was no formal audition, but both Ackie and Kravitz agree that their first meeting confirmed the two as kindred creative spirits. “We’re quite similar insofar as our influences and movie references, and we had this shorthand where Zoë could say one word to me, and I’m like ‘Holy shit, dude, I know what you mean,’ ” says Ackie. “I’m like, ‘You’re taking about the thing thing thing,’ and she’s like, ‘Bitch, yes, I’m talking about the thing thing thing.’ ” The two also were aligned on the hot-button issues of the film — what it looks like when a woman wants power and would do anything to be as close to the sources of it as possible — and their belief that Frida is a deliciously imperfect protagonist. 

“This story is so personal to me in terms of exploring what it feels like to be a woman, and of course when I’m talking to my girlfriends, we all have similar experiences, but when you go outside of your circle, it can be a little scary,” says Kravitz, who later changed the title of the film to avoid alienating female theatergoers. “I remember talking to Naomi about our relationships with power and what it feels like being told to be invisible, and it was a relief to realize, ‘Oh, you vibe with this.’ ”  

Ackie explains, “I often feel like, ‘Why do I compare myself to other people and why is it hard for me to be grateful for what I have instead of focusing on the things I don’t have?’ Blaming it on, oh, it’s because I’m a woman. Or oh, it’s because I’m Black, or I’m this or that. That’s all valid, but focusing on it doesn’t help me in my day-to-day life. When I forget that, and get more angry than I am grateful, that’s when I get myself into trouble — when I think back to Lady Macbeth, I was so happy with what I had. Now that I’ve got these two big movies coming out [Blink Twice and Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17], I feel like I’m being reminded to stay in the moment and be grateful for what I have.”

As Tatum was joining the project, he got his hands on some top-secret footage of Ackie in Whitney (“I don’t even know how,” he says) and watched it before they met for the first time. He came away from the viewing shaken up by the surety of her performance, especially given the stakes of playing such an iconic woman: “I never would have had the confidence to do that.” As a result, they were both nervous going into their chemistry read. Ackie pulled from her drama school roots to calm herself. “We’re in the Mexican sun, I’ve got a wig on, I’m pouring with sweat, and I’m just like — it’s Channing Tatum! I thought, I’m already fucking up. So I just turned to him and said, ‘Will you do a silly dance before the camera starts rolling, to loosen me up?’ He said sure, and we both started going boogala, boogala. I was like ‘OK, you’re a cool guy.’ ” 

***

The Whitney Houston biopic was meant to be her star-making turn. In some ways it was, putting Ackie at the top of the call sheet for the first time and earning her critical praise (THR’s review called out her “heartfelt, emotionally raw performance”) among the more negative reviews of the film overall. “It’s quite an interesting thing when you see a review that is very mixed, because even if [the negativity] isn’t about you, you worked with those people and you want everyone to be able to enjoy the same positivity,” she says. “Even after I saw the good reviews, I’d keep scrolling. Like, putting my name into Twitter to see if anyone hated me. I remember I saw one thing that said like, why is she playing Whitney Houston, she’s a D-list celebrity with a gap smile. At the time it felt like the end of the world, but now there’s a movie poster with my gap.”

The film underperformed at the box office, earning only $23 million domestically in theaters before streaming on Netflix, but Ackie says she has learned to have perspective about the elements of a project’s success that she can’t control. “I’m super aware that if you are in a film that earns a lot of money, your worth as an actress has increased, and I work hard to do what I can to increase its success — press, getting back on social media for promotion, things like that,” she explains. “But so many of the factors are external. With Whitney, on the first opening weekend there was some huge winter hurricane type thing. If I start to rely on numbers as a barometer, it pulls away from the creativity.”

Ackie pushed herself to lose 30 pounds for the role, in part because Houston was notably thin and in part because of the way she’d seen men contort their bodies for a role with great success. “I was working hard, not smart, and it put me in a bad mental space,” she says. 

She found, disastrously, that she became sort of addicted to her new, too-thin, form. “I was the size I’d always wanted to be. I was tiny, and I wanted to stay that way. I thought that being an American size 4 was going to open doors for me. And it’s fucked, but it does open doors.” She kept going to the gym, pushing against nature to hold on to the weight loss, but felt her joy being stripped away. A conversation with her boyfriend put things into jarring perspective. “I asked him if he had any body hang-ups and he said no,” she explains. “I’m like, ‘You haven’t been doing calorie math like me?’ This is probably too much to share, but maybe it will be helpful for someone. I got to a point with Whitney where you could name any food and I could tell you what the calorie intake was. I look back now and I’m so sad for myself because I should have enjoyed myself. I work hard so that I can pay my rent and my bills, and if you’re lucky, you have a little bit left over to travel — and eat whatever the fuck you want. So I should eat, bitch!”

The SAG strike handed Ackie the gift of time and an opportunity to recalibrate. She realized she was burned out, that she’d been focusing so much on building on the momentum of her career that she forgot to tend to her personal life. Despite its subject matter, Blink Twice turned out to be a remarkably healthy production for Ackie. They lived in the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico, filming at a hotel during the week and retiring to a house in the town of Merida on weekends. After night shoots, the group would gather with a speaker on the hotel’s veranda or on the lawn, listening to music and sipping mezcal as the sun came up. They became proper friends, with a group chat that’s still going strong two years later (named Pussy Island in honor of the original moniker). The script called for the actresses — Shawkat, as well as Hit Man star Adria Arjona — to be in bikinis most of the time, so they huddled up about two weeks before filming began to discuss any fears and hang-ups. “I was just like, ‘OK, ladies, we’re going to be running in bikinis, and I’ve got big ol’ tits, so how are these girls going to be kept safe and secure?’ And Zoë was just like, ‘I’ve got you, I will never put you in a position where you don’t feel comfortable, and I want you to feel hot and confident.’ ” 

Adds Kravitz: “If I can’t provide a safe space while making this movie, then what am I even preaching about? I wanted this production to be a place to work out these exact feelings and emotions with the help of these women. And as an actor, I understand the vulnerability of putting yourself on camera like that, so I can tell them what I would want to hear. Things like, ‘That angle doesn’t look so good, turn like this instead.’ ” 

Ackie next appears on the big screen in Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17, the long-awaited follow-up to Parasite, expected to hit in January; the actress flew straight from the Mexico set of Blink Twice to the first day of rehearsals for the futuristic love story that takes place on a distant planet. Ackie is still sworn to secrecy over the highly guarded plot and can only tell me about her first impressions of co-star Robert Pattinson (“He’s a thinker; he thinks very deeply about the role and the script and the structure, and we got to know each other that way”) and that she hasn’t seen the film yet. “It’s heightened emotions and tonally different than what I’ve done before, so I’m quite scared to see it and hoping I balanced it right,” she says. “But it’s all an experiment, right?” She tells me there are a few moments in the film that will have everyone talking, and I take a wild guess that one is a sex scene, and that in the world of Mickey 17, sex is mechanically quite different — and ask her to blink twice if I’m on the right track. “I’m going to half-blink. I can neither confirm nor deny,” she laughs. 

She has no idea what Blink Twice — and, subsequently, Mickey 17 — is going to do for her career. She’ll lean into whatever momentum they generate, of course, but she says she no longer has aspirations of superstardom. “I used to dream about everyone knowing who I was, but that’s changing,” she says. “Now it’s like, ‘Oh God, some people know who I am?’ That’s really scary.” 

This story first appeared in the August 21 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.