Naomi Ackie's Whitney Houston Role Clashed With Her Perfectionism
At an LFF Screen Talk, Naomi Ackie said that playing Whitney Houston in Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody clashed with her perfectionism. She framed the difficulty as a limit on knowledge: “You can know someone your whole life and not know their inner world.”
She admitted the film was a critical and box office bomb and offered a modest verdict on her own work: “I tried my best. It’s an interpretation.” She also confessed an initial reluctance to take on the role.
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The useful bit is the modesty of “It’s an interpretation.” It treats acting as a bounded attempt rather than a claim to have solved a person; her line about not knowing anyone’s inner world gives the phrase its force.
Bounded attempt is a generous phrase for a film that Ackie herself calls a critical and box office bomb. “Interpretation” can sound like a softer word for missing.