The makers of the new Whitney film, I Wanna Dance with Somebody, spent a year searching for the perfect actress — and found her in London. She tells Laura Pullman about hitting the high notes and being on the cusp of superstardom.
After winning the lead role in the new Whitney Houston biopic, Naomi Ackie went on an emotional roller coaster. “Oh my God, I cannot explain the amount of panic attacks. My poor family, I feel so bad for them,” says the actress. “You know in Peter Pan, Tinker Bell can only have one feeling at a time? I’m like that. I could only fill myself up with one feeling, so it would be absolute horror — ‘How am I going to do this?’ Or it would be like, ‘I can do it, I can take over the world’.”
The producers and director of I Wanna Dance with Somebody searched for a year on both sides of the Atlantic for the perfect person to take on Whitney “the Voice” Houston. Ackie recalls her team telling her about the audition: “I was like, ‘Ha ha, absolutely no. Are you insane?
I don’t look like Whitney. I don’t talk like Whitney. I don’t sing like Whitney.’” Later, when her audition self-tapes reduced her friends to tears, she thought maybe it wasn’t such a mad idea. In late 2020 her agents arrived on her doorstep with champagne and a stereo blasting I Wanna Dance with Somebody to announce that she had got the gig.
The 31-year-old decided to channel her anxiety into the role. “There were boundaries for me to work through about my own confidence levels and what I felt I was capable of,” she says when we meet on a damp Sunday morning in London. “And transforming that pressure I was feeling into the pressure Whitney felt all the time.”
Ackie’s star has been rising for the past six years — she appeared in 2016′s Lady Macbeth and 2019′s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, and in 2020 won a Bafta for the Netflix series The End of the F***ing World — but it will go stratospheric with Whitney. How does she feel about imminent megafame? “I’ve been trying to quantify what it means to me,” she says. “I’m very comfortable where I am, so the thought of people knowing who I am, or the idea of fame, makes me go, ‘Oh, but that means my life is going to change.’” She realises too that superstardom could be positive. “I’m trying to make things more fun in my life because I get very serious.”
The film charts Houston’s career from singing in church in New Jersey to becoming America’s sweetheart, belting out power ballads such as I Will Always Love You. It also covers her turbulent marriage to fellow musician Bobby Brown, her father frittering away her hard-earned millions and her wrestling with drug addiction before she died in a hotel bath aged 48 in 2012.
Nevertheless, the movie treads softly around the sensitive issues. For example, allegations made by Houston’s half-brother that she was sexually abused as a child by her cousin Dee Dee Warwick (Dionne Warwick’s sister) are ignored and we never see the star take drugs on screen. “Is it necessary to see someone take drugs when we know the story? I guess it’s trying to find the balance of acknowledging that as part of her story but not making that the whole story,” says Ackie, who was also an executive producer on the film. “The way Whitney was made fun of and ridiculed by the press was so unkind. Obviously now we have a bigger understanding of the illness of addiction.”
It also shows the romance between Houston and her assistant Robyn Crawford. The singer never addressed the rumours about their relationship, but Crawford confirmed they were partners in the early 80s in her 2019 memoir. Ackie wonders whether Houston was pansexual (someone who loves people regardless of their gender or sex). “There’s something about her that was very free in that and quite modern, given the time she was in,” she says. “That’s something I feel. I don’t know who I’ll end up with. I think that [part of Houston’s life] was actually probably easier for me to understand than some of the other things that she was going through because, you know, love is love.”
Over year-long preparations, the actress had movement lessons, dialect lessons and, naturally, singing lessons. While she’s a superb singer — it is Ackie performing in the early church scenes — she isn’t Whitney, so her voice was mixed in with Houston’s recordings: “I don’t have her top range. Impossible!” Homework also included watching Houston’s home videos and YouTube clips, reading biographies and speaking to family members. She became obsessed: “There was a point where I knew everyone’s lines back to front, front to back.”
Growing up in Walthamstow, northeast London, with her mum and dad, Debra and Brian, who worked for the NHS and Transport for London respectively, and her two siblings, Ackie recalls a household of big personalities: “There was a lot of conflict and laughter and dancing.” Besotted by musicals and Disney movies, aged about 12 she told her mum that she wanted to be a famous film star. “My mum took about an hour of my life that day,” Ackie says, smiling. “She was like, ‘You shouldn’t aim to be famous for anything, you should aim to be good at something.’ […] by the end I was crying, but that has stuck with me.”
When Ackie was 22, before she broke through in the industry, Debra died from cancer. “It’s tough. When you lose someone at that young age, you go, ‘I have all of these life things that are not going to be seen by her.’ Every celebration comes with a kind of ‘Ah, man.’ It’s nearly 10 years, so it’s a milder version, but it’s still something I grapple with.”
It was a few years after graduating from London’s Royal Central School of Speech and Drama that Ackie starred opposite Florence Pugh in Lady Macbeth, a critically praised film, though it didn’t open the audition floodgates as anticipated. She continued doing odd jobs: working in a theatre bar, selling hot dogs, waitressing. “I was frustrated because I was like, ‘I know what I can do and if I’m not given the opportunity to get better, then I’m just going to stay here knowing and no one else will know and you’ll rue the day,’” she says, laughing.
In 2017, while still living with her dad and with “below zero” in the bank, she quit all her jobs to focus on making it. “It felt like I was bluffing the universe because I didn’t have a plan. Then four months later I got Star Wars, so I was like, ‘Ah, the universe is listening!’”
Fast-forward to today and Ackie is riding high and lights up talking about her co-stars past and present. Of Pugh getting caught up in a media maelstrom over the recent film Don’t Worry Darling she says: “I sent her a text like, ‘You’re really handling everything so well, with style.’ She cares about the work. I think she is standout.” Of Stanley Tucci, who plays Clive Davis, Houston’s hotshot producer, in I Wanna Dance with Somebody, she gushes: “I love that man so much. He’s a cool guy, as in everything is approached with a sense of ease and joy.” She recalls how Tucci would send whisky to her dressing room after long days on set and has promised to teach her how to make ravioli. “I can’t cook for s***,” she says. “It’s the same as driving — I’m just obstinate about it. I just refuse.”
Ackie lives alone in a rented one-bedroom flat in north London and is hesitant about buying her own place. “I’ve always been broke. I was at drama school, I didn’t have any money, then I was doing theatre and I still didn’t have much money, so now I just sit on it. You just never know when something could happen and I can’t work and I’m self-employed.” Her father has always been supportive — does she dream of buying him a home? “He wants a boat. He’d call and joke like, ‘Where’s my boat?’” she says, giggling. “Now it’s changed from boat to, ‘Where’s my Oscar?’” Ackie admits she has pretended to have won an Oscar in the shower but is “trying to detach from the idea of self-worth through achievement”.
Talk turns to diversity within the British acting world. “We’ve got a long way to go, not because there are not parts available — it’s the quality of the roles, right? Who is gatekeeping? What stories are being told about people of colour?” she says, adding that she would like to see more actors of colour in projects that don’t centre on a white character. “Sometimes it can feel like it’s just box ticking.” She recently wept watching social media videos of little girls joyfully reacting to the trailer of the forthcoming Disney remake of The Little Mermaid, in which Ariel is played by the black actress Halle Bailey. “The outrage of having a black Little Mermaid goes to show how much representation means to people,” Ackie says. “If people are being like, ‘Oh no, I don’t see myself,’ and if they can just take that feeling for that one solitary film and think about how other people must feel on a daily basis …”
What’s next — perhaps a move to Hollywood? “I can’t say never, but London gives me life.” She’s also relaxed about finding romance. “I’ve got quite a masculine energy about it, like it’s not the time, I have things to do,” she says, frankly. “I’m the most important thing in my life right now and I have a lot of things, not even things to achieve and do, but things to figure out in myself.” For now, she isn’t interested in marriage or having children but has given some thought to freezing her eggs in case she changes her mind. “Why is it always the woman? Why is it I have to take the bloody pills and the bloody injections and go to the bloody clinic and have my legs spread? It is so annoying, so I avoid it,” she says.
Work-wise, she is currently filming alongside Robert Pattinson (“He’s actually really funny”) for a new movie by Bong Joon-ho, the Parasite director, as well as writing her own film. Ackie dreams of having her own production company but she’s determined to cut loose more too.
“I don’t really drink that much. I go to bed early so I can be ready for the next day,” she says. “I thought, ‘Oh well, in my 30s, I can do the party things that I should have done in my 20s because now I’ve got the money.’ It hasn’t happened yet, but I’m only 31 so I’ve got time.” Plenty of time — and the whole world at her feet.
I Wanna Dance with Somebody is out in cinemas on December 26.
Written by: Laura Pullman
© The Times of London