Naomi Ackie

Nasha, the security officer in Bong Joon Ho's Mickey 17 (2025), loves a man the ship treats as disposable and says so, without reservation. She also gets one furious speech to power, and it is the best written scene in the film. Naomi Ackie plays both the same way: she has been watching everybody and now she is going to say the thing. That is her habit. In Blink Twice (2024) Frida has watched Slater on her phone for years before she meets him, and on his island she keeps watching, trying to work out whether she is being flattered or handled. Ackie is at her best in that uncertainty, before the answer arrives.

The habit was there early. Her breakthrough was Anna, the nearly silent housemaid in Lady Macbeth (2016), and it fixed what critics have noticed ever since: the feeling is held under the surface and arrives late. Yardie (2018) and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019), as Jannah, followed. The second series of The End of the F*ing World (2019) gave her Bonnie, a stranger with a grievance whose business with James and Alyssa we will not describe; she was excellent, in a sequel to a story that had already finished. In 2022 she played Whitney Houston in I Wanna Dance with Somebody, and most critics thought better of her than of the film around her.

That has become the pattern. Scripts take the watching and forget to give her anything to do with it. Zoë Kravitz's Blink Twice is more interested in Slater than in Frida, so Frida has no life we see outside her wanting him, and when the story asks us to care what she chooses we are taking her on Ackie's face. The face is good. It is not a script. Chris Columbus's The Thursday Murder Club (2025) offers less: PC Donna De Freitas turns up to talk about window locks, is quietly adopted by the retirees and put to work behind her DCI's back, and is handed a murder nobody in the film minds about. Ackie does what the part allows, which is not much.

Bong is the one director so far who has matched her. Nasha's speech moved us more than a film with a man-printer had any business managing, and it did so because Ackie says it as a woman who has spent two hours being kind to someone the plot keeps killing and has finally had enough of being polite about it. Mark Ruffalo shouts through the rest of the picture. She does not need to.

She has said, "I love Big Themes. Films that ask big questions about technology, society, mortality." The films asking them have not always known what to do with her while they think. Mickey 17 did, because it let her be in love first and angry second. Sorry, Baby (2025) and Clayface (2026) are next. What we want to see is a film that is about the woman doing the watching.