‘I see the world for what it is’: actor Naomi Ackie’s rage-fuelled rising star

Naomi Ackie flexes her biceps and growls at the café table – then laughs at how ridiculous she’s being. She can’t believe this is her current fascination, but it is: what her body is capable of when she gives it what it needs. “It’s funny with exercise,” she says, rolling her eyes, “because I used to do it just to try to be skinny.” The 33-year-old British actor is embarrassed she fought it for so long – not knowing about the mental and emotional power, the real release that physical strength can deliver. “I feel like I’ve got a lot of energy rolling around in my body. I observe a lot, and I see a lot, and I feel a lot. I don’t say everything, so I have to get it out somewhere.”

Ackie never saw herself becoming one of those people who wear their Lycra to work so as not to lose precious minutes getting changed; the ones brave enough to walk into the weights room and freely lunge in front of the beefcakes. “I was scared for the longest time – I would sit by the machines. Now I really like the vibe of tapping into my masculine side, testing my strength and being around guys who are doing the same thing. It makes me feel grounded, and I cannot make good decisions if I’m not grounded.” This is what playing Whitney Houston in the 2022 biopic I Wanna Dance With Somebody taught her – a blockbuster role that catapulted her on to tube posters and into the spotlight.

“That role pushed me to the edge, to the point where I was like, I have to change something,” she says, “otherwise I will shrink within this job, within this body, within the world.” She played Houston from the age of 19 until her death at 48, sometimes both ends of that timeline in the same day. “I was away from home, isolated in Boston for like seven months, and hungry – I lost about 30lb to get to the shape of Whitney.” And, she was playing a real person who everyone loved: it scared her. “I lost a lot of myself, and not because of the art of it. It was to do with me feeling under pressure and trying to not be hated by the world – I was a catastrophic thinker, thinking I was never going to work again.”

In the six-month break she had between playing Houston and her next film, Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut Blink Twice, Ackie found the gym and discovered her body’s inextricable link to her mind. Her turn as Houston saw her nominated for the EE Rising Star award at the 2023 Baftas, but it also took something from her. “It got me to such a rockbottom that it was a wake-up call. A job cannot mean so much that it steals my life’s joy. I was like, we’re gonna need to fix some priorities.” Two films later, during the 2023 Sag-Aftra strike which gave her four enforced months off work, she realised her pace wasn’t sustainable – not just in how much she was working, but the level of perfection she expected of herself. “I didn’t realise how overwhelmed I was all the time. I was just living in an overwhelmed, anxious space, solidly.”

There’s little trace of that exhaustion today in the woman sitting across from me in a Notting Hill café, surrounded by shopping bags. “I look like such a fancy lady, but,” she says, “it’s not true!” Those bags, she insists, are for work purposes. Ackie, wearing all black, looks vibrant. She says she’s in “soft-life mode” now. Still, she wants to talk about anger.

“Even when I was little I wanted to play characters that were big, large, and like – aaaarggghhhh!” she screams, words doing no justice to the visceral thing straight from that gut that she wanted to portray. In The End of the F***ing World she plays a woman avenging her (serial rapist) lover’s death, Whitney Houston’s complicated life ended in an overdose in a bathtub, and Blink Twice leaves her drenched in blood. Not to mention the housemaid so traumatised by a murder in Lady Macbeth she is shocked into muteness. “We’re so conditioned to be well behaved, men and women – everyone is – but there is something very unique about being a woman and not even being able to recognise what anger is and how to channel it in a productive way. And I’m not talking about being productive so everyone gets along,” she clarifies, stabbing the halloumi on her plate. “I’m talking about being productive in a way that someone knows the effect they’ve had on you, and you’re giving them their shit back. It’s only as I’ve gotten older I’ve realised anger isn’t a bad thing. Anger is super, super useful. It’s a motivator. It’s a moving energy. It’s an action energy.”

Blink Twice is, certainly, a film about anger. It’s also a satirical thriller about misogyny, manipulation, abuse, and revenge. Ackie plays a cocktail waitress who becomes infatuated with a billionaire tech mogul (Channing Tatum), and takes him up on his offer to join him and his friends at his private island for a party. Its working title was Pussy Island, to set the tone. On this tropical idyll – so Eden-like a snake enables its women to learn the truth – they are all dressed alike in virginal white dresses when they sense something is wrong, that maybe they’re not having a great time after all, and are just pretending to be fine. “I really connected with the things that are being taken from them,” she says. “Choice, autonomy, opportunities. Sometimes it feels like there are higher forces that are fucking up my shit. I get rageful!” While it plays on stories we have seen in the news – Jeffrey Epstein’s private island, Little Saint James; all sorts of #MeToo tales – it is probable the film works at a frequency you can only hear if you’re tuned to it. It is, in extremis, about the general bullshit that comes with being a woman.

I tell Ackie about the security guard. When I saw the film a couple of weeks ago, it was just me and him in the screening room – a nice middle-aged man whose job it was to make sure I didn’t turn my phone back on and record something. When the film ended, he turned to me and said he didn’t get it. Ackie cackles. “EXACTLY. Isn’t that divide interesting?” Watched a certain way, it could seem like what happens in the film comes from nowhere. But tune in to the experiences all around you: women are close to boiling point already. “The whole film is about bursting,” she says. “You know, having to smile through the pain, having to trick yourself into thinking things are OK. I think a lot of people know that feeling, because it’s how you get by, and it’s how you fucking survive.”

Ackie was born in Camden, but moved to Walthamstow when she was five. Growing up with parents who had “real” jobs – her father works for Transport for London, her mother in the NHS – Ackie had no links to the film industry when she decided to be in it. “I was 11 and I said, ‘I want to be an actor.’ My parents were like: ‘Wow, leftfield. Nay!’ It really was like a lightning strike. I just went: that’s what I’m gonna do.” But Ackie’s mother wanted her to take it seriously. “When I was younger, I was more attached to the idea of being famous,” she admits. “I wanted to be the best actor so I could go on a red carpet and do premieres – or be in Harry Potter.” Ackie laughs. “Mum was like, ‘Why would you want to be famous? You should be an actor if you want to act.’ She was very keen that I do it because I love it, that I study it, and that I become a master of a craft, but never aim for being a star for being a star’s sake.” She looks serious for a moment. “Mum was always a very wise woman. And, I think when I was younger, I understood it, but now being older?” Since Ackie entered the industry, that guidance has proved invaluable. Without it, Ackie says, “I would not have lasted… the amount of times you’re told no, the amount of times you’re told you’re shit or you’re not good enough, or the things you infer from being told no… If I had been aiming for just pure stardom, I would have given up a long time ago.”

That reality check for Ackie came at 22, when her mother died – before getting a chance to see any of Ackie’s successes. Her death caused Ackie to “lose” her 20s to a kind of sedated half-life in her grief, which she says she only began emerging from three years ago. “I was still in that kind of optimistic, everyone’s gonna live forever, and everything’s gonna stay the same, you know?” she says. “And as a family, we had dealt with the previous death of my little sister when she was seven months old. In my head, I was like, ‘Well, if one person died in my family, that’s it.’ That was my deal with God. It was a true bargain with the universe.” Ackie says that now, whenever she experiences happy moments in her life, they are twinned with the “gut-wrenching sadness” of the other side of the coin. “That doesn’t take away from the happiness, and it doesn’t take away from the sadness – they’re just existing in my body at the same time.”

To this day, about once a year, Ackie announces to her family that she’s going to quit acting altogether – it’s such a routine now that her sister and father barely look up from the TV when she says it. But it comes from knowing that things can and do go wrong. And also, what a real job looks like: she approached acting with the same working-class attitude she was brought up with, believing this might not work, clinging to every safety net she had. At 27, she had been out of drama school for years, and could not catch a break. She was living at home with her dad, taking any job she could find on Facebook for cash: bar work, hotdog vendor, inflatable man (when I ask what this means she mimes walking like Frankenstein’s monster, a bleaker version of a football mascot hired for a company party: “It was so humiliating”). Meanwhile, Florence Pugh, her co-star in 2016’s Lady Macbeth – Ackie’s first feature film – had a career that was taking off.

“I was frustrated by the fact that there were no parts for young black women in the way that I wanted to play them. Like, I didn’t want to play a best friend, I didn’t want to play a single mum. I got to the point where I was below zero in my bank account. I couldn’t see where this opportunity was going to come from. And then I watched Batman.” She bursts out laughing, leans across the table, and assures me that she’s going somewhere with this. “This is good, I promise.”

She describes a scene in The Dark Knight Rises, where Bruce Wayne has been imprisoned in a pit that is open to the sky: to escape, he must climb out. He attempts to twice, and fails, thinking it’s only a question of physical strength. But an older prisoner tells him the secret: he has to do it without the rope, because the rope gives him the option to fail. It’s a lesson in strength of spirit.

“I watched that with my dad,” Ackie continues, “and I said I think it’s got a point. I need to withdraw the safety net.” She moved out of home, and quit all of her side jobs. “I gave myself a year. I was like, if I don’t get a job this year, I’m done. I put up my hands. I accept defeat. I quit. I’m done. I will go back to school.” Though she had previously had roles in Doctor Who and a handful of independent films, none of them had given her the security to move out of her childhood bedroom. Within four months of her self-set ultimatum, Ackie had booked Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker playing Jannah, a renegade Stormtrooper. Soon came starring roles in The End of the F***ing World, Steve McQueen’s Small Axe, and the Aziz Ansari sitcom Master of None.

I ask if catharsis is what she looks for in a role, given she picks so many dark ones. “No,” she replies. “I don’t think a job can or should be therapeutic, and acting is for other people; my job is to tell a story so they can feel it.” Why, then, the pull toward pain and darkness? She thinks for a bit. “There is something cleansing to me about exploring characters who are really in their darkness, because we don’t do it out in the open. It feels more intimate than a happy-go-lucky thing. That’s just not been my life. I haven’t had a happy-go-lucky life, and that’s fine, that’s what’s inside me. It feels real, it feels robust – it feels fucking messy. I think I was so fake-positive when I was a kid,” she says, “that my honesty has stepped into overdrive. I’m like: nothing is fine, ever. Sometimes it’s OK, sometimes. Most of the time, we’re all grappling with some level of deep trauma or pain. When I say I love darkness or morbid things, it’s not because I’m really sad or twisted – it’s because I see the world for what it is.”

Some bargains with the universe do work, it seems. Ackie’s upcoming schedule is impressive. After Blink Twice, there’s Mickey 17, a science-fiction film directed by Parasite’s Bong Joon-ho. Then, a role in the star-studded film adaptation of Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club. But this afternoon, she’ll be back at the gym, harnessing all the power she has. “Underneath all of that insecurity and shame is a gritty, grounded human being who’s super-resilient,” she says. And all of this – the pain, the trauma, the struggle – feeds into her work. “Listen, life will teach. There’s so many things I now understand in a deep way. I have access to the complexity of being a human being that I just did not have when I was 22. You think you have it – you don’t have it. I think I have it, but 40-year-old me is gonna look back on 33-year-old me and be like, ‘Bitch, you ain’t had nothing,’” she grins. “And so on and so forth, until the day I die.”