Mickey 17 star Naomi Ackie: ‘I feel like I spent my 20s in a fog'

Telegraph

23-02-2025

'I love Big Themes,' Naomi Ackie declares. She hits her knee emphatically with her hand. 'Films that ask big questions about technology, society, mortality.' It's true. Aged 26, she won a Best ­Supporting Actress Bafta in 2020 for her role in Channel 4's The End of the F---ing World (2019), a dark sitcom about a teenage psychopath on a road trip with his intended victim. Then she starred as Whitney Houston in the 2022 biopic I Wanna Dance with Somebody, a cautionary tale of celebrity, ­addiction and our collective ­obsession with spectacle. And she played a waitress ­seduced by a s­inister tech billionaire in the 2024 thriller Blink Twice (the big themes here speak for themselves). At just 32, she's already one of Britain's most charismatic and versatile young actresses.
She blames, or credits, her parents. These second-generation immigrants from Grenada, who worked for Transport for London and the NHS, 'raised me on Star Trek and The Twilight Zone'. Ackie grins. 'I remember they went to see The Matrix. They came back and shouted for me, my older brother and sister to get in the car, and took us right back to the cinema so we could all watch it. Then we drove around London for two hours ­discussing the ideas, the symbolism, how it related to our lives in Walthamstow. We would do that a lot, drive around in Rita, our aubergine-coloured Ford Mondeo, talking.'
No surprise, then, that when we meet for coffee at the Corinthia hotel in central London, Ackie – lively and leather-jacketed – is keen to tell me about her leading role in the new film Mickey 17. This blend of science fiction and black comedy, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival last weekend and will reach British cinemas on March 7, is the work of the Korean director Bong Joon-ho, whose 2019 film Parasite became the first non-­English language movie to take the Best Picture Oscar. Based on Edward Ashton's 2022 novel Mickey 7, Mickey 17 is set in a dys­topia in which humans have embarked on grimy grey tankers of spaceships, leaving a barren Earth lashed by sandstorms, in search of new planets to colonise.
Ackie plays Nasha, a security guard on one such ship, who falls for the film's unlikely hero, Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), an 'expendable'. His personality has been downloaded onto an external hard-drive, so he can be sent on a series of unsurvivable missions. Each time he dies – from extreme radiation sickness, or alien viruses – the ship's scientists are able to record his agonies in detail before 3D-printing a new body, downloading his consciousness and sending him out again. Yet Mickey remembers the distinctive agony of every death, and carries that dread into the next life. The action proper kicks off when Mickey's 17th iteration survives a mission on which everybody assumes him to have died, and he returns to his quarters to discover that Mickey 18 has been printed.
'It's about what it means to be human,' Ackie says. 'What it is to be alive, to feel alive, to want respect and understanding. Bong is asking questions about hierarchies – what are we doing right now, on Earth, to prevent that future becoming a reality?' Nasha and Mickey's home spaceship is run by a failed politician (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife (Toni Collette), a pair of grotesquely egomaniacal fascists allied with an evangelical cult. Ackie agrees that with his fake tan and belligerent shtick, Ruffalo's leader will remind viewers of US president Donald Trump. 'But,' she counters, 'you can go back through time, all over the globe, and point to people who want to dictate how we value the lives around us.'
She goes on: 'We're at a point with technology where in the next 50 to 100 years, we could be saying, 'Right. Time to pack up and move to Mars. Who deserves a seat on the spaceship?' If that happens, we need to think about how we encounter new beings. And we don't want to be taking the bulls--- of our past attitudes, our history of colonialism, into these brave new futures. We need to do better.'
Ackie lives with what she calls 'an awareness that we only get one go-around'. Her mother died of cancer when Naomi was 22 and had just graduated from drama school. 'I felt like I was on the brink of life, ready to leap into it all. I'd just been on my first holiday with a friend, to New York. Then, suddenly, everything came to a halt. It just stopped. Nothing. Looking back, I was in a fog for the rest of my 20s. I was working, I was trying to embrace all the experiences, but I can't remember a lot of it. There was a sense of deferred emotion.' She closes her eyes and sips her coffee. 'I feel like I'm living my 20s in my 30s, which is why I don't think I'll have children – if I'm lucky enough to be able to – until my 40s.'
As 'a black girl from Walthamstow', Ackie deadpans, a movie career was 'not a given'. She starred with Florence Pugh in the 2016 film Lady Macbeth, but watched Pugh's career soar while her own stop-started. 'It helps to know that my mum believed I could make it,' she says. 'She taught me that if you want to make work of quality, then you must take your time, be diligent, get obsessed. She taught me to approach my work stitch by stitch, little by little.' Hence Bong's approach to film­making suited her. 'He writes and creates storyboards alone. Then he shoots scenes line by line. Like building up a puzzle.'
Ackie's attitude to acting has changed, even in her short career. When she began, she 'treated it as a really sacred thing. I was a perfectionist.' But this approach made her ill. She lost a lot of weight to play Houston; her fear of being judged harshly by fans and critics led to what she carefully calls 'some form of breakdown'. Today, she feels she has her job in perspective. 'Acting for me, now, is a formula thing. I've tuned into the part of myself that used to dismantle TV remote controls to see how they work. Now, I look at a film, a character arc, and I see the cogs meshing, I see the mechanics. It's not my job to feel emotion when acting. It's my job to ensure the audience does.'
Loaded with shocks, laughs and a terrific alien species that she says Bong based 'on a sketch of a ­croissant', Mickey 17 may be Ackie's highest-profile current project, but it's far from her only one. She'll soon appear in Sorry, Baby (2025), the directorial debut from the comedian Eva Victor, in which she plays the best friend of a woman recovering from a sexual assault; it's already a critical darling, with The Hollywood Reporter praising Ackie's performance as 'wonderful' and 'nuanced'. We'll also see her opposite Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan and Ben Kingsley in the big-screen adaptation of Richard Osman's cosy-crime bestseller The Thursday Murder Club. In this ­Netflix drama, directed by Chris Columbus (of the first two Harry Potter films) and produced by ­Steven Spielberg, Ackie will play police officer Donna de Freitas, who helps the residents of a retirement home solve a crime.
In the long run, Ackie has ambitions to move into writing and directing her own films, but, for now, she's 'embracing my 'Be Here, Do It' vibe'. And while she would never want to be reincarnated, once or 17 times, she has started to notice the aspects of her late mother that have been imprinted into her. 'I argue very much like her. I tell the truth like her.' She smiles, wide and full. 'I'm embodying the things I loved about her more and more each day.'