She’s the Man was one of Naomi Ackie’s favorite movies growing up. The 2006 cult classic twist on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night starred Amanda Bynes as a cross-dressing soccer prodigy and Channing Tatum as the clueless, heartthrob team captain. Ackie, who was 13 when the film premiered, recalls re-watching it over and over again with her best friend, committing its cheesy one-liners to memory. Eighteen years later, Ackie, now 31, stars alongside Tatum in Zoë Kravitz’s highly anticipated directorial debut, Blink Twice.
She can’t quite believe it herself.
“It’s crazy. It’s not normal,” Ackie says, laughing. “If [someone had told me] you’re gonna work with [Tatum] one day, I would be like, ‘Oh, no way. You’re lying.’”
Ackie, who grew up in London, landed her first role at 11. It was for the part of the angel Gabriel in her school’s Nativity play. For the audition, she wore a “ridiculous denim bucket hat” and performed an original, biblical-themed rap. “We were going to be cool angels,” she says. “Cool-angels rap.”
From that moment on, Ackie knew she wanted to be an actress. Her parents, both second-generation immigrants from Grenada and British-government employees, were initially “taken aback.”
“There’s no actors or anything in my family,” Ackie says. “But as soon as they knew I was serious, they got serious.” Her parents quickly signed her up for singing and dance lessons.
In 2009, Ackie was accepted to the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, whose alumni include Joe Alwyn, Judi Dench, Carrie Fisher, and Martin Freeman. But after graduating in 2012, she spent nearly four years bouncing between dead-end jobs to keep herself afloat while waiting for her big break.
“It’s a really big question in your mind: whether you’re going to succeed or whether it’s just a waste of time,” says Ackie. “And at a certain point, at a certain age, it starts to cost more than it’s [worth] to continue.”
Her luck finally changed in 2016, when she booked the period drama Lady Macbeth, starring Florence Pugh. Ackie’s performance as the handmaiden Anna won her the British Independent Film Award for Most Promising Newcomer. She had broken into the industry.
Ackie has since proved to have enormous range, tackling dramas (Idris Elba’s directorial debut, Yardie, and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker), comedies (Aziz Ansari’s Master of None and The End of the F***ing World, for which Ackie won a best supporting actress BAFTA TV Award), and even starring in a Whitney Houston biopic.
It was while preparing to play Houston, in 2021, that Ackie first read the script for Blink Twice. “This is really special,” she recalls thinking. “I really, really, really want to do it.” After a long call with Kravitz, Ackie got her wish. She was cast in the leading role of Frida.
It helped that Ackie felt a certain affinity with her character, a cocktail waitress who is sucked into the world of Slater King, played by Tatum (Kravitz’s now fiancé), a controversy-embroiled and enormously wealthy tech tycoon. “She is attracted to the power without noticing the red flags,” says Ackie. “I’ve definitely found myself in places where I have been drawn to power and willing to give up my own.”
In the film, Frida is invited to King’s private island for a high-rolling weekend of partying. It soon becomes clear, however, that behind the never-ending champagne and matching white linen sets lies something more nefarious. Think White Lotus meets Get Out, with a dash of A Promising Young Woman.
“I think initially I was intimidated,” Ackie admits of the star-studded ensemble, which includes Simon Rex, Christian Slater, Geena Davis, and Kyle MacLachlan. “I never thought I would work with as many amazing performers as I have.” But Ackie soon settled in. “Channing and the rest of the cast were so welcoming and so humble and grounded that I was like, Oh, yeah, what am I talking about? You’re a human being,” she says.
Ackie seems on track to become a bona-fide movie star herself. In 2025, she is set to star in the science-fiction film Mickey 17 alongside Robert Pattinson and Mark Ruffalo, as well as in The Thursday Murder Club (based on Richard Osman’s book of the same name), with Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren.
And yet she is quick to insist that she doesn’t have it all figured out. “I’m still very uncertain all the time—about many things, not just the job. It’s just being human.”
Blink Twice is in theaters now
Paulina Prosnitz is an Associate Editor at AIR MAIL
