Naomi Ackie – The Voice

Naomi Ackie, the dazzling British actor playing Whitney Houston in a new Hollywood biopic, opens up about her surprising road from drama school to Star Wars to the greatest love of all

- By Yohana Desta. Photographs by Ruth Ossai

Halloween, 2021. Naomi Ackie had fully nailed Whitney Houston’s look from the music video for “I Will Always Love You.” “The black suit, the coiffed hair, and the red lips—iconic,” she says. Ackie wasn’t going to a costume party. She was doing her millionth callback for the lead role in the Houston biopic I Wanna Dance With Somebody. The British actor, who broke out in films like Lady Macbeth and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, had initially resisted pursuing the role. “I was like, ‘Absolutely not. That is too big.’ ” But her team talked her into it. So, there she was auditioning, wearing sleek Houstonian drag and belting The Voice’s signature ballad.

Two months later, when Ackie was shooting the third season of Master of None, her agents showed up at her London home unannounced, blasting “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” from a speaker. That’s how she learned that she’d snagged the role. They celebrated with a socially distanced Champagne toast, sprawled out on cushions in the hallway. Then Ackie had a realization: She had landed the part. Now she had to play it. “That took a long time to get my head around,” she says.