Photographs & interview by GREG WILLIAMS
As told to JANE CROWTHER

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In her downtime between Blink Twice and Mickey 17, the British actor paints with Greg Williams in London as she contemplates her artistic journey and the beauty of an imperfect canvas.

Naomi Ackie admits she’s a ‘big old perfectionist’ in her work, but when it comes to painting – the messier, the more ‘aimless’, the more imperfect, the better. ‘When you’re acting, there’s this feeling of having to be productive constantly,’ she explains as she sits on the floor of an artist studio off Brick Lane in London, getting her hands dirty with her oil paints. She has arrived in overalls, her hair tied back, ready to get stuck in. ‘Painting feels like a way for me to not be productive but feel creative, even when I’m not actually creating…’ She smears colour across her canvas and stops to admire the way two paints bleed together, discovering the work as she goes. It’s a relatively new hobby for her, born from Covid lockdown after she stole her boyfriend’s painting kit that she’d bought him at Christmas. ‘I don’t really take up a lot of hobbies because I think, ‘If I’m not the best at it, I don’t want to do it,’ she laughs. ‘So then I gave myself a mission, which was to do something that didn’t have to be beautiful. I didn’t have to be perfect. And thus started my ugly painting collection. It felt like therapy. I would have a glass of wine, listen to really good music. And I would just spend hours redoing, scraping… the texture of it makes me feel really good. I love the feeling it gives me.’

It’s possibly a hobby that’s always been waiting for her, given she studied fashion and textiles in college and had been obsessed with Jackson Pollock as a teen. ‘I grew up in Walthamstow [East London] and as a teenager, I would jump on a train and go to the Tate Modern. There was a Jackson Pollock painting called Summertime there. That was my favourite. And then obviously when the acting thing happened I decided that my focus was just going to be on that.’ 

Inspired by the Harry Potter films at the age of 11, Ackie took up drama out of school and progressed to being a student at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. After graduation, she appeared in Doctor Who and miniseries The Five before she made her name in Lady Macbeth alongside Florence Pugh and Cosmo Jarvis. ‘It has stood the test of time as our career starter,’ she says of the film. ‘We did not know it at the time. We were just bumming around in Newcastle for 20 days. I lived with Florence, Cosmo lived two minutes’ walk away in a different house. We’d just drink and chat every evening, and then go in and do some acting.’ That bumming around won numerous BIFAs, including Most Promising Newcomer for Ackie. But while she saw Pugh’s career detonate, her ascent was more of slow burn thanks to a lack of diverse roles. ‘There were no parts available for me to audition for. The path is a bit harder when you’re a person of colour. It’s getting better. But around that time, there was nothing really coming through.’

Things changed after she’d completed TV series The End of the F***ing World and landed a part in one of the biggest movie franchises possible, playing resistance rebel Jannah in Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker. ‘It was a big deal,’ she says of the role as well as the importance of representation. ‘I remember going to the office, and J.J. [Abrams, director] was just like, “This is the first time we’re going to see someone, a Black girl… There’s going to be a lot of people looking up to that; a lot of kids looking up to that.” And it was like, “Whoa, that’s really cool.”’ 

The exposure led to roles in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe, in Netflix series Master of None and being offered the opportunity to play an iconic real-life Black figure in Whitney Houston. The experience of making the biopic I Wanna Dance With Somebody was a learning one for Ackie – emotionally and professionally. ‘With Whitney, there was a technical side that had to be practised over and over again, which is something I’m decent at – but I didn’t anticipate the emotional stuff that I would feel outside of the set.’ I ask what that feeling was. ‘Judgement, mate. Judgement that was sometimes imagined. I wasn’t on Instagram. I didn’t know what was being said, or what people’s expectations were. I purposefully took myself out of it, so I wouldn’t have to deal with that. But I imagined it. We’re in a time where everyone’s like, “You can dance like nobody’s watching” but that’s just not realistic! People are watching. I know they’re watching. Sometimes I feel a quite contrived feeling in this work and in my body – those two opposing forces of knowing people are watching you, but also trying to be yourself. My head goes into a spin.’

Playing Whitney also taught her negotiation skills. ‘I had to really advocate for myself on that job. It’s the first lead role I’d ever done, and I had to learn very quickly how to say no, and how to respectfully put my foot down. For so long, I was just so grateful to be here. But when it comes to the work and the opportunities I get, I’m not grateful to have a job, because I know I’m good. But if you’re performing at a high level, and you are suffering underneath that – that can cost you money and energy in the long run. After Whitney, I was spent. I couldn’t work for six months. I was on antidepressants. I’d never put my body through that before. And neither will I again, because it’s not necessary. There’s an immersive way that audiences view actors now, which I think is about partially not just about the story that they’re telling, but what they have to go through to get there. It adds to the mythology of that actor, right? Dedicated. It sends an interesting message that I know I received, and that’s why I went through what I went through on Whitney. I ain’t doing that again. I’ve got a whole life that I’m trying to live. I’m now protective of my time and my energy. I’m not a robot. I have a service. You’re paying me for that service. I want to do it to the best of my ability. So how do we figure out a way for you to get what you want, and for me to get what I want?’

As she admires the canvas, she considers that painting might have helped her through that difficult time. ‘This feels instinctive,’ she says of the piece as she leans in to create a swirl across the canvas. ‘A “who gives a shit” and “dance like nobody’s watching” kind of vibe. And it’s joyful. I think sometimes I’ve lost – and do lose – the joy in my job. It becomes really complicated and hurtful sometimes, and businesslike and hard. I guess I’m speaking about work so much because it takes up so much of my life and also my brain space. I’m trying to rebalance what I have given so much of my life’s energy towards. Also trying to take this job, the idea of what an artist is, and take it off the pedestal. I’m so aware that I’m in an extremely lucky position. But also, on a daily basis, when I wake up in the morning, I’m not like, “I made a film the other day.” You wake up, and your belly’s hurting because you ate too much bread the night before and you’re like, “I should get up and go to the gym, but I can’t be arsed.” And you go on bloody Instagram, and look at other people who are saying that they’re living their lives in a way that you deem is better than yours, or their waistline is slimmer, or their skin looks clearer… I feel guilt for feeling so normal in an industry that is so weird. I complain a lot!’

I ask what she complains about. ‘I complain because I’m a perfectionist. Because I fear that I will never be satisfied. Because sometimes I feel like I can see the cogs of the industry that I belong to turning, and I can see that something in it is broken. What are we saying to people? We’re setting impossible expectations when I know, inside of it, that I am not reaching any of those expectations. The guilt I have when I post on Instagram. The guilt I have when I borrow someone else’s clothes that aren’t mine but in the moment it makes it seem like it’s mine… Most days, I’m questioning what the fuck I’m doing, how I’m doing it, who’s judging me, how I’m judging myself, where I’m not meeting my expectations or someone else’s expectations or my age. When am I meant to have fucking kids? Fucking hell, I don’t own a house yet. I need to buy a house…’ She explodes into contagious laughter again and holds up her multi-coloured palms. ‘I just paint and breathe.’

I tell her there’s a Leonard Cohen song with lyrics that seem to speak to all of our obsession with the pursuit of perfection. ‘Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. And that’s where the light gets in.’ She nods. ‘My mum always used to say, “You can lie to everyone else, but never lie to yourself.” And I took that to heart. No feelings are invalid. It’s what you do with them. Be honest with yourself. I feel like that’s actually kinder to yourself.’ Her mum’s advice is even more bittersweet now – she died of cancer 10 years ago and was a fierce champion of Ackie’s career, despite having no background in it. ‘They’re children of immigrants,’ she says of her parents with Grenada parentage, ‘where you get through, you work hard, you make sure that your kids can set themselves up in a really secure way. Coming from that to me saying, “I want to be an artist in this field we have no connection to!” I think it freaked my mum out. But she was such a good, strategic person. She was like, “If you want to get there in 10 years, you have to do this…” And especially as a working-class Black girl.’ A former seamstress who worked for the NHS, she and Ackie’s Transport for London-employee father moved the family to Walthamstow from Camden where the shy little girl grew to be  a ‘theatre kid’. ‘I hid behind being an actor, and the pursuit of being an actor,’ Ackie recalls of overcoming her shyness. ‘The acting part was like sheer freedom. It was the voice. It was the process. It was meaty. It’s tangible, and you could dig your hands into it. You make something. All of that is still really cool to me. It’s just got a little more complicated the more I’ve worked.’

Those complications include negotiating the public figure side of bigger, more high-profile jobs. ‘The acting part, I don’t have to think about. I’ve practised enough. I’ve studied enough. That arrives. The public figure shit? I’m like: huh? I thought I was just acting, and now it’s a whole, “What’s your brand? What’s your message? What’s your thing? What do you stand for? Who are your followers?” And then you start to feel a little bit like a product or like a billboard. And it pulls you further and further away from the thing that you did it for. Even artists have to eat. You have to make money. We live in a capitalist society so we have to explore our art in the parameters of those with money. And this is an industry that still exists within a system of Eurocentric beauty standards, of a very clear-cut way of what makes money and what has value, that lies outside of talent sometimes.’

Despite her recognition of a standard-ised ideal of beauty, Ackie admits to feeling intimidated by the template. ‘I go to any event and I’m around what is deemed the most beautiful of beautiful people everywhere. Most of them are lovely and I know they’re feeling exactly the same as me. And yet I go into those spaces, and I leave feeling like, “Oh, I’ve got some work to do. I’ve got to properly gym more. Maybe I should shrink my chin?”’ 

Her face filled the screen in recent feminist thriller Blink Twice, playing the rageful, vengeful lead in an abusive patriarchal scenario. Embraced by audiences and critics, it set Ackie up for her next water-cooler movie, Bong Joon-ho’s subversive sci-fi Mickey 17. ‘I never thought I would be in a Bong Joon-ho film! It’s a really fun, quite cheeky piece of work. And I don’t think it’s what people anticipate it to be. It’s a thing all on its own. It makes me really hope for cinema. We’re in a space where there’s money that needs to be recouped. There are shareholders now. There are owners of these platforms that are not about creating work. It’s about how many streaming people can we get? So this felt like a real breakout of that. And it’s where my heart is at.’

She recently filmed for three days on Asif Kapadia’s docu-drama 2073, exploring the end of the world as we know it thanks to geo-politics, financial inequality, AI and social media manipulation. ‘I’m always thinking that the world is going to end,’ Ackie admits of her attraction to the project. ‘I’m used to thinking about death. I had a little sister who died when I was two and Mum died. So endings are always present in my head.’ After that comes The Thursday Murder Club, an all-star ensemble based on Richard Osman’s bestseller, Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters and Justin Kurzel’s Morning. And Ackie is not only creating oil paintings for herself – she’s written a TV show and a film and aspires to direct. For now though, on the brick floor of the studio, she is focusing entirely on her canvas, in the moment. It’s imperfectly finished. She considers signing it but decides to be more hands-on, leave a mark more unique to her. ‘I’ll put a fingerprint on it…’