When I go through hectic times, I end up wiping my memory,” Naomi Ackie explains. It’s a good thing, she insists. “I do it if I’m overwhelmed, or if I’m around people I don’t like. I can just lift them out of my mind without effort.”
We’re talking about selective amnesia because we’re talking about Whitney Houston, who Ackie played in a 2022 biopic called I Wanna Dance with Somebody. It was an enormous opportunity, one that promised to propel the London-born actor – then having just turned 31 – into the big leagues. But with it came extra scrutiny, extra commitments. “Pray I don’t get thrown into some lion’s den,” she had told me back then, before being whisked away for more press junkets and radio appearances. The reviews for the film came out soon afterwards, praising her performance but criticising everything else about it. It made no real money. Ackie went home. “I got real whiplash,” she recalls now. “I was Whitney Houston and then I’m just back sitting in my damp little basement flat in [North London district] Angel.”
