Acting is decidedly not therapy for rising star Naomi Ackie, but that doesn’t mean her work doesn’t hit big emotional wallops. Really, she just wants to share them with you. “Purging out my emotions and performance are two separate things,” she told IndieWire over Zoom while discussing her new film “Blink Twice.” “To make this sound very, very unromantic, acting is my job, and I really love the craft of it. A really special part of acting to me is to be able to make an audience feel, and for you not to be affected and not to use it as a tool for therapy, because that defeats the objective of the craft not being for me, but for the audience members.”
Originally conceived under the title “Pussy Island” in 2017, Zoë Kravitz and co-writer E.T. Feigenbaum wrote the “Blink Twice” script and sent it to Ackie’s email inbox a couple of years later. She loved it immediately. “I would have done anything to play Frida,” Ackie said. “I would have done 10 rounds of auditions, but during our Zoom call, we just started plotting, and I knew we were in a really good place, because I couldn’t put the script down.”
In Kravitz’s directorial debut, Ackie leads as the 27-year-old New Yorker Frida. The thrill-seeking protagonist has a wistful spirit, and when she’s disillusioned with her economic circumstances and a ho-hum existence scraping by with her roommate Jess (Alia Shawkat), she still finds time to ponder what her dream life scenario would be. Mostly, that includes a seemingly out-of-character obsession with formerly disgraced tech kingpin Slater King (Channing Tatum); when Frida engineers a meeting with Slater that results in the billionaire inviting her and Jess to party with him and his pals on his private island, she giddily accepts. She has no idea what’s waiting for her there.
“Frida is a character who reminded me of myself when I was 27. This is a girl who has that drive and a feeling of, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing with my life, and I don’t have access to what I think I want,’ and the film shows the lengths of what Frida is willing to give up to achieve that,” Ackie said.
Ackie and her captivating performance are at the forefront of nearly every moment of the film, and we’re scarcely not observing increasingly outrageous turns through her eyes. She’s hardly alone — the film’s cast also includes Adria Arjona, Christian Slater, Simon Rex, Haley Joel Osment, Geena Davis, and more — and the cast’s offscreen chemistry seeps into the film’s essential dynamics of what happens when you bond with relative strangers on a remote island.
“I’ve not experienced being on a set like‘Blink Twice’ where everyone is on set most of the time. There are so many shared scenes where everyone is all together, and you just naturally start to build up the energy,” Ackie said of her time shooting on location in Mexico. “You’re just continuing performance like the camera just turned on, and Zoë and the producers brought together a bunch of people that they knew would connect and who want to tell a good story they really care about.”
Raised in London, the 31-year-old rising star still thinks about the valuable lessons of discipline that she was taught acting inside London theater. “The access to the arts is a privilege we have being in London,” she said. “It’s a rich, very rich city, and my theater training was all about discipline more than the skill.” Oftentimes, she said, Ackie would take the tube into Soho to be closer to the epicenter where theater thrives, and she recalls her early years at acting school at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama as “really magical.”
“Blink Twice” is Ackie’s first full-throttle thriller, following her turns as Bonnie in Netflix’s “The End of the F**king World” and the eponymous once-in-a-lifetime-performer in Sony Pictures’ “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody.”Ackie loves taking on complicated characters that go through a life-altering metamorphosis or come equipped with a faulty moral compass — either way, she leads with creative instinct first.
“Instinct is so interesting to me, because the way I see instinct is it’s a practice at first, and then it eventually becomes natural, and then we call that instinct,” she said. “Then, what happened with me, Zoë, and the rest of the cast was that we naturally talked about it so much beforehand. The story became a subliminal thought, constantly whirring around our minds that by the time we got to set; it felt instinctual.”
The summer of 2022 was a whirlwind season for Ackie’s professional acting career. After she made “Blink Twice,” she was also dropping into various other filmmakers’ worlds. “In 2022, I filmed ‘Blink Twice,’ and then I remember jumping on a plane and doing reshoots for‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody,’ and then I went straight from those reshoots to doing [Bong Joon Ho’s] ‘Mickey 17.’” The delays of the “Mickey 17” release (now set for January 31 next year) allowed Ackie to catch her breath after experiencing a little bit of fatigue from playing different characters for 12, sometimes 14 hours a day.
“Previously, I had thought I wanted to be an actor that was never seen out anywhere because I’m always working job to job to job,” Ackie said. “I learned in that time that, as much fun as that was in that year, to be able to do all of those roles, I need a decent amount of time to ground myself before I go into the next project. Mainly because you get into such a rhythm that you don’t get to remember everything.”
Jumping between franchise roles to indie art house projects gives Ackie an active sense of how to tell a story with real passion. “My new direction is about people and collaborators,” Ackie said of her growing filmography. “Where is the work coming from? That is my burning question now.”
“Blink Twice” opens in theaters from Amazon MGM Studios on Friday, August 23.
