Starring as Whitney Houston catapulted Naomi Ackie to fame – and drove her to exhaustion. She tells Hayley Campbell about channelling anger, coping with grief, and why she’s drawn to the dark side of life
aomi 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.
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.
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.
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.
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