Naomi Scott, the actress who spent fifteen years singing in other people’s voices

Naomi Scott

Photo: iDominick / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 6, 1993 Hounslow, London, England
Occupation	Actress and singer
Known for	The Martian, Aladdin, Power Rangers
Awards	Teen Choice · Astra Film

When Naomi Scott sings to a packed cinema, the voice has almost always belonged to somebody else. It belonged to Jasmine, who was handed a new song in Disney’s live-action Aladdin and made it the film’s big solo. It belonged to Skye Riley, a pop star falling apart on a comeback tour while something smiles at her out of the crowd. Scott has spent most of her working life as an actress hired partly for a voice she was rarely allowed to use as herself.

That split matters more than the franchise reboots that made her face familiar. Studios kept casting her as the bright, likeable lead of a family product; the work that has lasted is the work where she plays a performer under pressure. The projects she now controls are smaller: a debut album titled after her middle name, and a romance she produced through her own company.

Her mother, Usha, is the Ugandan-born daughter of Gujarati Indian parents and came to Britain as a child after Idi Amin expelled the country’s South Asians; her father, Christopher, is English. Scott arrived on 6 May 1993 in Hounslow, west London, and at eight moved with the family to Woodford, where both parents served as pastors at the Bridge Church. She grew up singing gospel and listening to Kim Burrell, Mary Mary and Kirk Franklin, and left Davenant Foundation School in Loughton halfway through her A-levels to chase acting.

Kéllé Bryan, formerly of the girl group Eternal, spotted her and took her on as a client, and Scott spent time writing with the pop producers Xenomania. After the Disney Channel UK series Life Bites, she made her first American production in 2011, the Disney Channel film Lemonade Mouth, playing Mo, one of five misfit students who form a band. She sang lead on “She’s So Gone”, which later went platinum in the United States. The same year Fox cast her as Maddy Shannon in the prehistoric science-fiction series Terra Nova, cancelled after one season.

The next stretch was lean. She self-released the EP Invisible Division in 2014 and followed it with Promises in 2016. Ridley Scott cast her as Ryoko in The Martian, and every scene in which she spoke was cut, leaving her a face in the background. Screen International named her one of its Stars of Tomorrow in 2015, and she then landed Kimberly Hart, the Pink Ranger, in the 2017 reboot of Power Rangers, where a black belt in karate helped with the fights. The film took 142 million dollars worldwide against a 105 million budget, and no sequel followed.

In 2019 the studio machine finally bet on her twice. As Jasmine in Guy Ritchie‘s Aladdin, she was given “Speechless”, a song written for this version of the princess, and the film passed a billion dollars at the box office. The song went platinum in the US, and Scott won a Teen Choice Award and earned a Saturn nomination. Months later she starred with Kristen Stewart and Ella Balinska in Elizabeth Banks‘s Charlie’s Angels, which drew mixed reviews.

The Jasmine role also brought the sharpest criticism of her career. Agrabah is a fictional Arab city, and when Disney chose a British actress of Indian descent for its princess, critics argued that the studio was again treating the Middle East and South Asia as interchangeable. The objection targeted the casting, not the performance; Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle called Scott the film’s “real star”. Still, the franchise years left her with a narrow public image, the pleasant lead of a reboot built for the whole family, and none of those films gave her a character with real damage in it. After 2019 she stepped away from acting for a while.

She came back on different terms. In 2020 she and her husband, the footballer Jordan Spence, founded the production company New Name Entertainment. In 2022 she played Olivia Lytton, the young parliamentary aide whose accusation drives the Netflix drama Anatomy of a Scandal, opposite Sienna Miller and Rupert Friend. The science-fiction film Long Distance surfaced in Vietnam in 2024 and on Hulu in the US a year later.

Then Parker Finn cast her in Smile 2 as Skye Riley, a pop star haunted by a curse on the eve of a tour, and for once the two halves of her career shared a body. Scott modelled the character on 2010s pop, Lady Gaga and Britney Spears, and recorded the songs released on Smile 2: The Skye Riley EP. Benjamin Lee of The Guardian called her “a fantastically committed goes-to-hell-and-back scream queen”; Owen Gleiberman wrote in Variety that she gave the film “a genuine emotional center”. The role won her the Astra Award for best performance in a horror or thriller, with nominations at the Critics’ Choice Super Awards and the Saturn Awards.

The record she had been circling for years came next. After previewing the songs at Lollapalooza in Chicago in August 2025, she released F.I.G on 20 March 2026: short for Fall Into Grace, an R&B and alternative pop album produced mostly by the Norwegian producer Lido. Grace is her middle name; the fig comes from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, where a woman sees each fig on a tree as a different life she might lead. Scott has described the album as a way of “mourning other versions of my life”. She directed the video for “Cherry” herself and toured North America in June.

Eternal Return, Yaniv Raz’s romance, casts her as Cass, a young woman who has given up on love, opposite Kit Harington as a mapmaker of imaginary places and Simon Callow; it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2025, and it is the first feature produced by New Name. David Michôd’s stoner comedy Wizards!, shot in Queensland in 2022 with Pete Davidson and Orlando Bloom and later recut, still has no release date. She is also filming Netflix’s six-part adaptation of Roald Dahl’s short stories for adults, written by Danny Brocklehurst, alongside Nicola Coughlan, Imelda Staunton and Dominic West.

Scott is a practising Christian and a UK ambassador for the charity Compassion International. She met Spence at church when she was sixteen, and they married in June 2014.

Eternal Return opens in Brazil on 12 November and in American cinemas on 4 December through Quiver Distribution. For an actress who spent fifteen years lending her voice to other people’s stories, it is the first feature from her own company, with her name both on screen and among the producers.

Featured Films

Long Distance (2024) — Smile 2 (2024) — as Skye Riley

Tags: actors, actresses, Kit Harington, Anatomy of a Scandal, Parker Finn, Eternal Return, Naomi Scott

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