Naomi Ackie wasn’t the only person slightly surprised when she was named among the nominees for the 2023 BAFTA Rising Star award, the British Academy’s annual honor for up-and-coming on-screen film talent.
As the Londoner explains, she’s been “working professionally” since she was 20. She’s now 31. She already won a very similar award almost six years ago, claiming the most promising newcomer honor at the 2017 British Independent Film Awards for Lady Macbeth (playing a terrified mute housemaid alongside fellow breakout Florence Pugh). At the same awards, she was nominated for best supporting actress.
Since then Ackie has appeared in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (a significant role as Stormtrooper-turned-resistance-fighter Jannah), Idris Elba’s directorial debut Yardie and as a child psychologist in Education, part of Steve McQueen’s acclaimed Small Axe anthology. In 2020, she even won a BAFTA TV Award, a best supporting actress honor for Netflix/Channel 4’s dark Brit comedy The End of the F***ing World.
For many, Ackie’s “star” — a concept she admits to finding strange — has already risen. Not that she’s remotely complaining.
“I’ve always loved the BAFTAs, and being recognized by them in any form is really great,” she says, speaking to The Hollywood Reporter in a busy cafe around the corner from where she lives in the north London neighborhood of Islington (just a few stops on the underground from where she grew up in Walthamstow). “It shows I’m doing something right and being seen by the right people.”
Of course, Ackie fully appreciates the reason why she landed one of this year’s five BAFTA Rising Star nominee slots (the only BAFTA voted on by the public and announced at the ceremony on Feb. 19) — her first leading role. And it’s a leading role like few others: playing someone considered by many to be the greatest female pop artist of all time. Kasi Lemmons’ musical biopic Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody was largely well received by critics, but it was Ackie’s portrayal as The Voice herself that received much of the acclaim (it also landed her a slot in the BAFTA leading actress longlist, although she missed out on a full nomination).
In his review, THR’s David Rooney described it as a “heartfelt, emotionally raw performance,” adding that while the actress — who is heard literally singing as Houston early in the film (her voice later transitions into the icon for the musical elements once she turns professional) — may not closely resemble the star, she captured her radiance “whether commanding a stage or just kicking back away from the spotlight,” and “deftly removes the distance separating the troubled star from the audience.”
Ackie is acutely aware how much of a career step-up it was to take on the challenge of such a celebrated American figure (particularly as a Brit), and in such a major, studio-backed production (the film was produced by Sony’s TriStar Pictures).
“Up to this point, I’ve been supporting amazing actors, very comfortably and happily, but this was the first time I had taken on a project myself, which is definitely a different level of pressure,” she says. “It’s so funny, it was like oh, you want to play a lead role, let’s just go for the biggest you could ever do. How about Whitney Houston? How did we get here? It’s such a big jump.”
It was a jump that Ackie says she fully committed to during the lengthy audition process, donning fake teeth to hide the gap in hers (she even admits to considering “going to a cosmetic dentist” to have it done permanently). It was also a jump that, with typically British self-deprecation, she says she never truly believed she was actually going to be taking right up until her first camera test.
“I remember saying to the director, ‘If this goes my way…,’ and she started laughing and was like, ‘We’ve literally flown in from L.A.’” Ackie was filming the third season of Aziz Anzari’s Master of None in and around London at the time, and despite the I Wanna Dance With Somebody team jumping on a plane and making the 11-hour flight to visit her (and during lockdown), she convinced herself that they “must do this for everyone.” They didn’t.
It’s a similar attitude Ackie has had throughout her film career, which has — like many actors — featured numerous peaks and troughs, and various moments when she felt like giving up.
Born into a working-class family to a father who worked for London’s public transport system and a mother in the National Health Service, Ackie soon realized that, without the connections enjoyed by many looking to join the industry, she was going to have to put the work in to turn her love of acting (born partly from being “really jealous” of Emma Watson getting to play Hermione in Harry Potter) into something tangible.
So she went to London’s Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, graduating in 2014 having developed a new passion for theater and the craft behind it. “I was really into collaborating, devising shows, and wanted to make my own theater company and just be on the road,” she says. Work would gradually begin flowing (for a time she worked at the Almeida Theater, not far from where she now lives), but it came to a halt when, at the age of 22, her mother passed away. “I took about a year and a half off,” she says. “I just thought I’d never act again, the love was gone.”
It was shortly after returning that Ackie’s agent invited her to audition for her first-ever film role. She thought it went so badly she went shopping afterwards to cheer herself up (a tactic she regularly deployed at the time). But from that solitary audition, she got the part. “So I was like, I guess I’m doing film now.”
Just a few months later, Ackie found herself sharing an apartment with Pugh, drinking every night and living mostly off a diet of rice crackers smothered in pesto and feta (a creation devised by Pugh, apparently), before their 4 a.m. car pick-up and a full day’s shooting in period costume at the Lambton Estate in the north of England.
Lady Macbeth — which premiered in Toronto in 2016 to rapturous critical acclaim — would launch several careers. Little needs to be said of Pugh’s trajectory since, but alongside Ackie, co-star Cosmo Jarvis would also land a BIFA most promising newcomer nomination, and later earned plaudits — and a BIFA leading actor nom — for crime drama Calm With Horses. He recently joined Robert De Niro in mobster biopic Wise Guys. Director William Oldroyd, for whom Lady Macbeth was his feature debut, has just bowed his long-awaited follow-up, Eileen, starring Anne Hathaway and Thomasin McKensie, in Sundance, while writer Alice Birch adapted Sally Rooney’s Normal People for the Hulu/BBC miniseries and wrote for the second season of Succession (she also co-wrote the screenplay for Pugh’s latest, The Wonder).
For Ackie, 24 when they were filming, Lady Macbeth was the “lightbulb moment” that made her decide that “film is now my thing.” But for all the noise and acclaim from her debut performance, she says it was still “difficult to find roles.” There was a lot of auditioning, not necessarily for parts she wanted or felt right for (“but at the time you don’t have a choice”), and exhausting days spent sending out self-tape after self-tape. But nothing was landing. After a couple of years, she was about to give it all up.
“I was nearly about to quit. I was still working on side jobs, still trying to make it work, still living at home. I’d had enough. And then Star Wars came along.”
At the time, it was merely ‘Untitled Disney Project Character’ and arrived among a bunch of other auditions. But she went along to Disney’s London offices. “I remember leaving and seeing this group of women who looked like me but better and thinking, ‘One of these is going to get it,’ and left to do another audition,” she says.
In true feast or famine style, by the time her phone rang inviting Ackie for a chemistry test with John Boyega for J.J. Abrams, she’d already been offered another part — a recurring role on an Amazon sci-fi project (she doesn’t recall the name of it now). Both career-changing calls came within minutes of each other.
“I remember standing on Tottenham Court Road getting a call about the [Amazon] contract and thinking, ‘That is the most money I’ve ever seen in my life,’ then ringing my dad, and being like ‘Dad, I’m finally making money!’ Hanging up and then getting another call and them saying ‘J.J. loves you’.”
The Amazon contract actually ended up forcing Disney’s hand, with Ackie needing a decision ASAP. She got the Star Wars offer at 7 a.m. the morning after the chemistry read. “The crazy thing was when I was on the job, J.J. pulled me aside and told me that mine was the first video he saw and that he thought ‘It can’t be that easy.’ But then he said he went through everyone else and realized, ‘Oh, it was that easy’.”
The frantic all-or-nothing workload may be part and parcel of the profession for many actors, but Ackie admits the periods where it feels “quite stagnant” between jobs don’t always sit well with her (she says she hasn’t actually taken a “real holiday” since before Star Wars was filming in 2018). “I think I’m addicted to the output and I’m afraid of the quiet,” she says.
Thankfully, she’s been enjoying considerably less quiet of late.
After shooting Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody at the end of 2021 in the U.S., she did manage a few months off (“I was finally able to relax”) before flying to Mexico for Zoe Kravitz’s buzzy debut feature Pussy Island, MGM’s thriller in which she plays a cocktail waitress invited to a private island by a billionaire. Ackie — who was recommended by the casting director Carmen Cuba who had seen The End of the F***ing World — was brought on board to lead a cast that also includes Channing Tatum, Simon Rex, Geena Davis, Christian Slater and Haley Joel Osment.
The day after wrapping Pussy Island, she was on a plane to L.A. for Whitney reshoots, then on another plane to London to join Robert Pattinson, Steven Yuen, Toni Collette and Mark Ruffalo in Bong Joon-Ho’s first — and much-anticipated — post-Parasite feature, the dystopian sci-fi Mickey 17. She was offered the role while in the middle of shooting Whitney. Thankfully, Ackie says she generally feels “much more grounded” when she’s filming, so was far less intimidated than she might usually have been by the prospect of speaking to Bong (“I just love him,” she says, adding that Mickey 17 was “a heaven job, goddamn”). Keeping the theme, the morning after wrapping with Bong, she was in the air again, this time to do press for Whitney.
This intense, non-stop seven-month period was “a beautiful working experience… honestly, I had the best fucking time,” and one where Ackie says she really felt the biggest change in her career, particularly compared to the pre-Star Wars days.
“It feels like the right projects are now finding me,” she says. “There’s less auditioning. I have enough work now, and that feels different.” Endlessly recording self-tapes and waiting for calls, thankfully, seems to be a thing of the past.
Another significant change is that Ackie has been able to develop another, more creative, aspect of her work. On both Master of None and Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody, she’s credited as an executive producer, something she blames on not being able to keep her mouth shut.
“From a dramaturgical standpoint, I offered up story solutions and ideas on both of those projects. I wasn’t a big part of it, but made myself available for structural perspective commentary,” she says. “From my theater background, I just can’t help but be, like, oh, isn’t it cool that we can do it like this…”
On the third season of Master of None, which Ackie joined as Alicia, the wife of Lena Waithe’s character Denise, she tweaked her lines to sound more like her, while some of her own personal stories were incorporated into the script. “Aziz knew I wanted to move into production and be a producer at some point, and that kind of happened organically,” she says.
On Whitney, as the first person cast, she again was able to offer her take on the story and certain lines, drawing on her storytelling skills and research into the singer. “I think I may have crossed a line, but I had this one whole thing where I was like ‘Whitney’s a boxer, and she’s getting ready to fight… I really wanted to see a moment where she was almost getting ready to go into the ring.”
If she did cross a line, Whitney’s producers didn’t mind — they gave her the credit without her even asking.
“It’s a really kind gift, just to get the credit alone, and means that I might be taken a little bit more seriously when I say I want to create my own stuff,” she says. “I want to have the option of stepping outside of acting when I need to and do something else for a while.”
And — foregoing the opportunity to take a proper vacation once more (“If I book a holiday, noone will hire me and all of that money spent on the holiday will have been fucking wasted!”) — that’s what she’s doing now.
Ackie is currently developing three projects: two TV shows and a feature film. The feature, which she’s writing, is loosely based on Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and a story she describes as “body horror with heart.” One of the TV shows — “an amazing epic set in the Caribbean with lots of magic realism” — she’s producing and has found a writer for. On the other series, about financial domination and BDSM (“I’m really interested in the concept of power dynamics”), she’s developing a pilot with AMC, but should it get commissioned hopes to bring together a writer’s room of people from both the financial and BDSM communities.
“It’s all very much still in the works, and it’s something I’m so new at — I’m very much learning as I go, which is nice,” she says. The end goal is for Ackie to not just set up her own production company, but for it to be one that supports those from similar backgrounds, educating people about “all the different beautiful jobs you can have within the film industry,” and offering grants and mentorship opportunities for people who want to tell stories.
There’s a lot going on, and more has just landed on her plate, with THR recently revealing that Ackie has joined Laura Dern, Benedict Cumberbatch and Noah Jupe in Justin Kurzel’s sci-fi Morning, shooting later this year. Not that it concerns someone with such an insatiable appetite for workload and self-improvement (Ackie admits that, having seen Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody, she knows she could have done her performance “so much better” and is likely to feel the same with Mickey 17 and Pussy Island).
“There’s something really interesting to me about the idea of being okay… of just being satisfied. And I’m never satisfied, it absolutely terrifies me,” she says. “It means in a moment of true happiness and of success, I’m always like, yeah, but this wasn’t quite right. I really don’t know how to enjoy that moment.”
Ackie is, however, allowing herself one night off on Feb. 19 — a genuine moment of enjoyment — even if her BAFTA Rising Star nomination was unexpected.
“It’s surprising, but it’s really lovely,” she notes. “And I think it’s an opportunity for me, more than anything, to just celebrate where I’m at.”
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