Naomi Ackie won her prizes beside the lead. Clayface hands her the scalpel

Naomi Ackie

Photo: Our Movie Guide / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 22, 1991 Walthamstow, London, England
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Shelter, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Mickey 17
Awards	BAFTA · Independent Spirit · British Independent Film

The roles that made Naomi Ackie’s name were rarely the ones on the poster. She was the maid who takes the blame in Lady Macbeth, the stranger who comes looking for revenge in The End of the F***ing World, the best friend who keeps the lights on in Sorry, Baby. The prizes followed those characters, while the two leads she has carried earned her praise inside films that critics argued about. James Watkins’s Clayface now hands her a different job. She plays Dr. Caitlyn Corr, a scientist working at the edge of respectable medicine who offers a disfigured actor his face back and turns his body into living clay. In a studio franchise, the plot finally turns on what her character decides to do.

She grew up in Walthamstow, in east London, the youngest of three children of parents whose own families had come from Grenada. Her father worked for Transport for London and her mother for the National Health Service. Her first role came at eleven, when Walthamstow School for Girls cast her as the angel Gabriel in its nativity play.

Her training was at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, on a course built around collaborative, devised theatre, and she graduated in 2012, the year she turned 21. Stage work came first, including Billy the Girl at Soho Theatre and Solace of the Road at Derby Theatre. Television arrived in 2015 with a single episode of Doctor Who.

Her first feature changed the scale of the work. William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth, adapted from Nikolai Leskov’s novella, cast her as Anna, the maid to a young bride played by Florence Pugh, in a house where the servants absorb the punishment meant for others. Oldroyd cast the film without regard to race, and the decision gave the story’s question of who pays for a crime a sharper edge. Ackie won the British Independent Film Award for most promising newcomer in 2017, the same year Screen International named her one of its Stars of Tomorrow.

The parts that followed sat inside other people’s projects. She played Mona in Yardie, Idris Elba‘s first film as a director. J. J. Abrams gave her Jannah in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, a former First Order stormtrooper living among deserters on the planet Kef Bir. The same year she joined the second season of The End of the F***ing World as Bonnie, a young woman who sets out to avenge the death of the man she loved, and the role brought her the BAFTA television award for best supporting actress in 2020. A year later the third season of Master of None, released as Moments in Love, set its original lead aside to follow a marriage, and Ackie played Alicia, wife of Lena Waithe’s Denise. Reviewers singled out the two performances as the reason to stay with five deliberately slow episodes.

Then came the lead. Kasi Lemmons’s I Wanna Dance with Somebody asked her to play Whitney Houston, and she also took an executive producer credit. Most of the singing on screen is Houston’s own recordings, so the performance had to live in breath, posture and the timing of a mouth to a voice the audience already knew by heart. Variety called her “a veritable artist of lip-syncing”; The Hollywood Reporter noted that she is a capable singer herself and can be heard briefly in early scenes. She was nominated for the BAFTA Rising Star award, and in Cannes she received the Trophée Chopard for female revelation of the year.

Here the record gets uneven. The Houston film drew mixed reviews that faulted its length and its step-by-step loyalty to the music biopic template, and it grossed $59.8 million on a $45 million budget before finding a second life at the top of Netflix‘s American chart. Zoë Kravitz’s Blink Twice then gave her a second lead as Frida, a cocktail waitress invited to the private island of a tech billionaire played by Channing Tatum, and the film did well with critics, yet the consensus on Rotten Tomatoes framed it as the debut that placed Kravitz among directors to watch. The easy conclusion is that Ackie is a supporting actress by temperament. The evidence says something else: in both leads she was the part reviewers agreed on, and what was in question was the film around her.

The past two years have been the busiest of her career. Bong Joon Ho cast her as Nasha, the security agent who stays loyal to Robert Pattinson‘s expendable clone in Mickey 17, a part she has said began with an unplanned conversation with the director in Boston, on a day off from the Houston shoot. In Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby, the Sundance film A24 released in 2025, she played Lydie, the friend who stays beside a graduate student after an assault and keeps returning to her. That performance won her the Independent Spirit Award for best supporting performance in February 2026. She also turned up as PC Donna De Freitas in Chris Columbus’s The Thursday Murder Club, sharing scenes with Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan and Ben Kingsley, and the London Film Critics’ Circle nominated her as British/Irish performer of the year for those three films together.

2026 has kept the pace. In January she played Roberta Frost, acting chief of MI6, opposite Jason Statham in Ric Roman Waugh’s Shelter. In Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters, which premiered at South by Southwest and opened in American cinemas through Neon in May, she is Sade, part of a shoplifting crew alongside Keke Palmer, the one who wants to sell the stolen suits to secure her children’s future. She walked the film’s red carpet at the BFI London Film Festival on October 9.

Clayface, the third film in DC Studios’ new universe, premiered in Los Angeles on October 13 and opens in the United States on October 23. Written by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini and shot in Liverpool and at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden, it pairs her with Tom Rhys Harries as Matt Hagen, the actor whose transformation she engineers, and with Max Minghella as the detective she is dating. Her character has been compared to Elizabeth Holmes, which makes Caitlyn Corr a role that asks Ackie to be the problem rather than the person who absorbs it.

Two more films are in post-production. She has joined Maika Monroe in They Follow, David Robert Mitchell’s sequel to It Follows, set a decade after the original and due from Neon. She also leads To Make Ends Meat, the second feature from Luna Carmoon, about three women in debt to violent men. Whatever Clayface does at the box office next weekend, the next stretch of her career already holds a horror sequel and a lead in Carmoon’s film.