Naomi Ackie Is No Novice

The actress keeps almost breaking out. Can her role in a new thriller be the difference?

- Niellah Arboine

I MEET THE ACTRESS Naomi Ackie outside Angel Station in North London on a balmy July afternoon. After doing the very British commentary-on-the-weather thing, we take a right and climb down a few steps onto the narrow canal path lined with houseboats. Ackie started these daily walks during the pandemic after moving out of a house share into her own place, though she’s quick to add that she’s still renting: “I don’t come from money.” As we talk, she smoothly navigates by the bikes whizzing past us and coos at cute dogs. This neighborhood feels good for her soul, she says. “I don’t think I’ll ever leave.” ¶ She moved to Angel from Tottenham around the same time she got the main role in the music biopic Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody in 2020. While preparing for that film, she was offered the lead in the new psychological thriller Blink Twice. Next year, she’ll be in Bong Joon Ho’s upcoming sci-fi epic, Mickey 17. “When it rains, it pours,” she says with a grin.

Directed by Zoë Kravitz, who began writing the script with E.T. Feigenbaum in 2017, Blink Twice, formerly called Pussy Island, picks apart gendered power dynamics and trauma through the lens of the superelite. Ackie plays Frida, an undervalued caterer infatuated with a billionaire tech bro named Slater King (an unsettling Channing Tatum), who has recently been canceled for an unnamed indiscretion. After Frida and her best friend, Jess (Alia Shawkat), charm him at a dinner, he whisks them away to his private tropical island alongside a handful of other guests, including a former contestant on a Survivor-type reality show (Adria Arjona) and Slater’s smarmy right-hand man, Vic (Christian Slater). On the island, they eat exquisite meals and throw lavish, drugfueled parties, but eventually Frida realizes something is very, very wrong.