Naomi Ackie is currently enjoying some rare, and well-earned, rest.
The London-born star has been grafting hard for the past decade, making her on-screen debut in a 2015 episode of Doctor Who, before joining the Star Wars franchise and later bagging a TV Bafta for her performance in the dark comedy The End Of The Fucking World.
These days, though, she’s probably best known for her leading role in the recent Whitney Houston biopic I Wanna Dance With Somebody, a break-out performance that earned Naomi her first Bafta nomination in the EE Rising Star Award category.
“I definitely cracked open a bottle of wine,” Naomi laughs as she recalls the night she found out she was up for the coveted award. “I didn’t have the whole thing in one night, but I definitely enjoyed a nice little celebratory tipple.
“I’m kind of seeing this whole situation as a win-win. Take the award or not, the fact that we’ve come this far to be recognised in this way is a huge deal for all of us.”
She’s not wrong, either. The award Naomi is up for has proved to be a star-maker, with Emma Stone, Lupita Nyong’o, Andrew Garfield, Margot Robbie, Timothée Chálamet and Florence Pugh among its past nominees – and that’s without getting into former winners.
“If I get half of the career that so many of them have had, I’ll be a happy woman,” she says. “I’m just excited to be at the Baftas with my best mate and have a really fun night.”
Naomi is also clearly relieved to be talking about the nomination at all, confessing that the space between finding out she was in the running and the news being announced officially was a tough one for her.
She explains: “We were told that we had to keep it a secret, which I understand as ‘don’t tell anyone but your dad and your sister’. Gosh, I won’t lie, the whole ‘keeping things a secret’ thing in jobs and stuff like that is absolutely the most frustrating thing, I’m not the best at secret-keeping.
“So yeah, I told them, and that was really fun. And then I went back to chilling, because luckily enough, after Whitney came out, I’ve just been in a kind of state of rest. It’s all been really lovely and easy-going.”
Naomi wanting to embrace this period of “chilling” is understandable.
Taking on the role of one of the biggest icons in music history – particularly one whose own tumultuous personal life is already so public – is obviously no mean feat, and the actor is open about the toll the production took on her.
“I got a text from someone who saw it yesterday, and she was like, ’you must have gone through it’,” Naomi says of the “athletic role” of playing Whitney Houston. “She was like, ‘you did that’.
“It was really intense – it was long filming hours and it was a lot to do, and obviously I was in every day, because I was the main character.
“It was definitely a huge learning curve. I wasn’t used to that level of stamina before.”
Unlike many actors, Naomi insists she didn’t find it especially difficult to step out of character at the end of a day’s filming, but notes: “There’s this thing with the whole acting thing where it kind of stays in your body a little bit. Even if you’re not playing the character, the energy of being really upset or really angry stays in your body, and so that was the thing that was hard to kind of shake off.
“Even when I finished the job, it took me about a month to calm down off the high of that experience.”
In fact, since I Wanna Dance With Somebody’s release, Naomi admits that she still finds herself unable to listen to Whitney’s music.
“I’m still in that place, to be honest,” she laughs. “The film came out at Christmas, and it’s still a lot for me to kind of absorb that that happened for me and to me and with me.
“It’s quite an odd thing, I haven’t listened to Whitney’s songs since Christmas, but I’m looking forward to the day that I can re-tune in and not have flashbacks to filming days.”
She continues: “As with any kind of project, there are good days and bad days. With this one, I think we all carried a lot of responsibility and there was an intense way that we were working to get it as right as possible.
“[I have] some very vivid memories of it, and a lot of them are amazing, especially when we were doing performances and stuff like that – they were some of the best days that I’ve ever had on set.
“But the pressure to keep the performance high, and stay as accurate as possible, yeah, it was something that I didn’t anticipate.”
“I’m so glad that I went through it, because I know how to handle it next time,” she adds.
The pressure Naomi felt to get things right mirrored some of the struggles Whitney dealt with in her own professional life, which the actor says “offered me the space to have a lot of empathy for Whitney in a way that I didn’t previously have”.
“I had just been like, ‘well, she’s a superstar, she has a gift, so it must be easy to cultivate that gift and keep doing it, because it’s something that you love’,” Naomi recalls. “But by the same token, I love acting, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not hard sometimes.”
Although Naomi is a self-professed “huge” fan of Whitney’s work, she was only 20 when the music icon died, and admits she was perhaps “too young” to truly understand the treatment Whitney received at the hands of the world’s media in her final years.
More recently, there’s been a real reckoning about the way certain celebrities were treated, particularly in the first decade of the new millennium, thanks in no small part to documentaries around key figures like Britney Spears, Janet Jackson and Whitney herself.
Naomi says: “At the time, I wasn’t aware of how cruel the press was to celebrities. And when we look back on it, it’s really horrible. Look at what they did to Britney Spears and all of that stuff.
“I have a huge amount of sympathy for these people, these human beings, who were paraded around and used as scapegoats for people’s entertainment.
“And it made me really angry on Whitney’s behalf that she had to go through that – while going through everything she was already going through behind closed doors. It’s just not nice, and it’s not fair, to be punished like that.”
Because so much of Whitney’s turbulent personal drama played out in such a public way, there was a question among many fans about whether a biopic was appropriate, particularly off the back of two markedly different documentaries exploring the singer’s struggles.
This is an argument Naomi understands herself.
“Right at the beginning, and even while I was auditioning, there was a lot of, like, ‘do I have a right to try and do this?’,” she says.
“I was really, really nervous about even trying because it felt like something that was, at the time, unachievable, if I’m being really honest.
“I felt so very, very, very far away from Whitney Houston the superstar, Nay from Walthamstow… you know what I mean? It was like, ‘how am I going to do this?’.
“In the end, it just took a day at a time, chipping away at this character and this portrayal of Whitney. And really understanding as well, I’m not playing Whitney Houston to be Whitney Houston, I’m absorbing all of the research to show a portrayal of Whitney Houston, and keeping that at the forefront, instead of just trying to imitate someone.”
The biopic takes the viewer through the highs and lows of Whitney’s career, beginning with her days singing back-up for her mother and leading through to her iconic rendition of the US national anthem at the Super Bowl and her epic success with the film The Bodyguard.
It also doesn’t shy away from delving into some of Whitney’s private struggles, including her marriage to fellow singer Bobby Brown and struggles with substance abuse.
While the film ends with a celebratory flashback to her performance at the 1994 American Music Awards, before that we see Whitney on the night of her death, even running herself her final bath.
“For the family, for the director, it was important for us to explore that,” Naomi says. “And so I guess my job within the confines of a script is to find a way to make it as heartfelt and as sensitive as possible.
“That’s always the thing about biopics, you are stepping on moments in someone’s life where you’re making public something that is private. The only way I could get my mind around it was to make it as subtle as possible, and make it as internal an exploration as possible.”
Naomi says filming this “imagining of what Whitney’s last moments were” was both a “beautiful and quite scary” prospect.
“That was one of those scenes – and I’m sure all actors get it – where you’re like, ‘ooh, this one, I don’t know how I’m going to tackle it, how I’m going to get my mind around it’.”
So, how did she?
“I very much left it to the day to figure it out,” she explains, with another laugh. “But it felt like an acknowledgement of where she was emotionally during that whole time – if not the fact of how it happened.”
It’s well-documented that I Wanna Dance With Somebody predominantly used recordings of Whitney’s actual singing in the film, with Naomi sporting a variety of wigs to help look as much like the biopic’s subject as possible, as well as a set of artificial teeth.
“To be honest, it was the wig and the teeth, as soon as they were in, I was in Whitney mode,” she says. “As soon as I took the wig off, and the teeth out, I was back to just being Nay.”
Although she acknowledges filming with these teeth was “challenging” (“you got used to it after a certain point, but having to put the teeth in, and then forgetting that they’re in, and then you’re eating lunch…”), one major thing Naomi took away from playing Whitney is a love of transforming into someone totally different.
And with I Wanna Dance With Somebody behind her, and filming complete on her next projects (Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning Parasite, and Pussy Island, the directorial debut of Zoe Kravitz) complete, Naomi is now eyeing her next metamorphosis.
“I kind of like the idea of transformation more and more,” she enthuses. “I’ve really enjoyed, in my career, getting to play so many different roles.
“I’m starting to get really curious about who I can turn into next. Now I’m kind of like, ‘what other ways can I transform myself?’.”
Voting for the EE Rising Star Award is now open at ee.co.uk/BAFTA. The winner will be announced at the EE BAFTA Film Awards on Sunday 19 February.