NAOMI
ACKIE

London-born actor Naomi Ackie made a significant early impression as Anna in William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth (2016). The performance earned the Most Promising Newcomer award at the 2017 British Independent Film Awards. Anna is a maid within the household surrounding Florence Pugh’s Katherine, which places Ackie’s character in a very different position from the woman at the centre of the film. For FLM.RED, watching Anna means paying attention to what a scene permits her to say and what her presence communicates without speech. The performance helps make the household’s unequal relationships visible.

Television brought another distinctive role as Bonnie in the second series of The End of the F***ing World. Ackie won the 2020 BAFTA Television Award for Supporting Actress for that work. She also played Jannah in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019), entering a much larger film ensemble. The contrast offers a way to follow her adjustment to different narrative scales. FLM.RED finds her work interesting when a new arrival changes the assumptions other characters have made: the audience must decide how to read a person before the story has supplied every explanation.

Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody (2022), directed by Kasi Lemmons, cast Ackie as Houston. Portraying a singer whose voice is already deeply familiar brings a particular collaborative challenge. Editor Daysha Broadway described the film’s blending of Ackie’s voice with Houston’s recordings; the singing should not simply be credited in full to the actor. Ackie’s performance also has to work through posture, expression and the movement between private exchanges and public appearances. In FLM.RED’s reading, that movement is a useful focus: the person preparing to face an audience and the figure an audience recognises need to belong to the same dramatic life.

Later work includes Zoë Kravitz’s Blink Twice (2024) and Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 (2025), alongside an expanding range of film collaborations. The latter places Ackie in a science-fiction ensemble with Robert Pattinson, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette and Mark Ruffalo. These credits provide further entry points rather than a single explanation of her acting. A viewer coming from the period setting of Lady Macbeth can follow the same performer into television, a musical biography or speculative fiction and encounter different demands each time. The links below show films currently connected to Ackie in FLM.RED, not her complete filmography.