Yahoo Lifestyle “There was no plan B”: Naomie Harris on making it in Hollywood
The first time I talk to Naomie Harris, she appears on my screen looking the picture of relaxation, with hair in dreadlocks and a simple white T-shirt thrown over an orange bikini; behind her are ceiling-height windows that look out onto the pool area of the villa where she’s staying in Costa Rica. When we meet in person a fortnight later for Bazaar’s shoot, she’s back in full performance mode, dancing barefoot on the table in a suite at Raffles London at the OWO, and singing along to an Eighties soundtrack as the wind machine blasts her curls in every direction.
Her enthusiasm is contagious, but it’s the product of years spent figuring out the right balance between work and rest. “I think what keeps me passionate about acting is not taking on too much,” she says thoughtfully, when we finally have the chance to sit down together in Hampstead’s cosy Holly Bush pub (she has lived in north London her entire life). “I’ll do perhaps one or two projects a year, and that’s enough for me. I think of acting as something very sacred, because I feel so protective of my characters and connect with them really deeply. It’s more than just a job – but it’s also work, and work does take from you. So it’s a case of making sure I fill up my tank as much as it’s being depleted.”
It seems appropriate, for someone who has such a considered approach to her own mental health, that Harris should play a therapist in her latest film, Steven Soderbergh’s highly anticipated new spy thriller Black Bag. Not that her character, Zoe, is necessarily the person you’d want to talk to from the couch. “She’s completely unconventional and unorthodox, and that’s why I had so much fun playing her,” says Harris, who worked with a clinical psychologist to prepare for the role. “I was excited by the opportunity, because when I’m with a therapist myself, there’s always a part of me wondering what they’re thinking and feeling; what they really want to say. How do you get to the point of being so detached when the other person is highly emotional?”
Black Bag sees Harris join an ensemble cast of six high-calibre actors – including her “acting idol” Cate Blanchett, with whom she shares a tense two-hander scene – for a fast-paced adventure that puts a contemporary twist on the traditional whodunnit. Soderbergh says he cast her because of her “laser-focused intelligence” – a vital quality for a narrative in which the acting needs to be subtle enough to convince audiences that any one of the characters could be a traitor. The script, observes Harris, is unusually even-handed in its distribution of key scenes, which plays to her strengths as an actress who has tackled starring and supporting roles with equal aplomb. “What’s interesting, having done both, is that I’ve realised being a supporting actress is actually harder,” she says. “As a lead, you’re in pretty much every day, so you get to understand the rhythm of the crew, how the director works and the pace of the whole operation, as well as developing a level of confidence and trust with those around you. You don’t have that when you play supporting roles, particularly when you come in for short periods of time.”
Harris has established herself as one of the industry’s most trusted character actresses, having made her onscreen debut when she was just nine years old. From a young age, she was determined to act (“There was no plan B”), and enrolled at the Anna Scher theatre school in Islington with the support of her mother Carmen, a television scriptwriter, who brought her up alone and facilitated her early auditions. Harris credits her with encouraging her to persevere when her confidence faltered: “She would tell me that, with hard work, the impossible is always possible.”
Harris has fond memories of her formative experiences in the television series Simon and the Witch (1987) and The Tomorrow People (1992). At school, though, things were less rosy: as is often the case with child stars, she suffered severe bullying, not helped by the fact that she had to wear a correctional brace following a diagnosis with scoliosis aged 11, for which she underwent a serious operation and spent a month in hospital. “Until you’ve had the experience of being really ill, I don’t think you can understand what it’s like to truly treasure your body,” she says, explaining that she now follows a strict diet and spends a lot of time meditating to preserve her health. “Most people with scoliosis live in constant pain, so I don’t know how my body worked out a way to heal, but I’m forever grateful it did,” she adds.
The bullying has taken longer to process – and she admits she still feels the impact of old wounds – but if nothing else, it has served as “fuel” for her career. “I had so much rage and desire to prove myself to the people who bullied me,” she says.
That drive propelled her towards a degree in social and political sciences at the University of Cambridge, followed by an acting course at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School – and then, all of a sudden, nothing. “I’d thought I was going to have this great success, but I spent nine months unemployed,” she recalls. “With hindsight, that isn’t a long time for an actor, but it felt like an eternity because I hadn’t been expecting it. That was tough on the psyche – I didn’t think I could even call myself an actress, because what was I doing except waiting for the phone to ring? Nobody would hire me.”
Roles did follow, albeit not as rapidly as she had hoped: she appeared in Danny Boyle’s cult classic 28 Days Later in 2002, Michael Mann’s Miami Vice in 2006, and two Pirates of the Caribbean sequels. None of these brought overnight stardom, but nor was Harris prepared to lower her standards and take anything she was offered for the sake of ‘making it’.
“Even at the start of my career, I never just said yes to everything – I think I had a very clear vision for myself,” she remembers. An early iteration of Miami Vice included a scene that required her to be nude; she refused outright and said she was prepared to walk away unless it was removed. The director agreed and she remained in the cast. “I look back at that girl and I’m like, ‘Wow, you had balls’,” she says now, “but I just always knew where my boundaries were.”
Her biggest breakthrough came after the casting director Debbie McWilliams saw her perform on stage in the National Theatre’s 2011 production of Frankenstein and put her name forward to appear in the Bond film Skyfall (2012). “I didn’t understand it at the beginning, because I thought I didn’t have the kind of assets they’d need for a typical Bond girl,” she says. “Then I realised they wanted me for Moneypenny and it all made sense.”
Typically for Harris, she was self-assured about the task at hand. “I knew I was being hired to reinvent the role, so I purposely didn’t go back and watch old Bond movies – I just set out to connect with the heart and soul of the character.” She has since appeared in two more films (Spectre and No Time to Die), on each occasion imbuing Eve Moneypenny with a fierce independence and a fresh energy that nonetheless feels true to the character’s heritage. (When we speak, the sale of the Bond rights from the Broccoli family to Amazon MGM Studios has just been made public, and Harris admits she has trepidation about the future of the franchise. “I just hope they don’t try to make it too modern – we all grew up with Bond, and I think it needs those classic elements for people to connect with it,” she says. Who, I wonder, would she nominate as the next James Bond? “Well, I was just in Black Bag with Regé-Jean Page, and he does wear a suit very well…”)
Between Bond appearances, Harris has embodied a series of complex female characters, including Winnie Mandela in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom (2013), the quick-witted young barrister Gail Perkins in the film adaptation of John Le Carré’s Our Kind of Traitor (2016) and – perhaps most memorably – the abusive, drug-addicted mother Paula in the Oscar-winning 2016 drama Moonlight. The rapturous response to her performance in the latter took her by surprise, since as a supporting actress, she had only spent three days on set in what she says was a “scrappy” operation (it had a production budget of just $1.5million).
Nevertheless, she moved audiences and critics alike with her ability to access the deepest recesses of her character’s suffering. “I spent a lot of time listening to interviews with women with crack addiction, and the one theme that came through was that they had all been sexually abused,” she explains. “That was my way in to Paula – not to stand in judgement of her, but to understand that her addiction came from a tremendous well of pain that she wasn’t able to heal.”
Harris had her own demons to contend with in the wake of Moonlight’s extraordinary success, which had catapulted her onto the awards circuit – an experience she found uncomfortable. “It’s a bit like doing a political campaign, and that’s precisely not the reason I got involved in acting,” she says. “I’m not particularly interested in selling myself, and yet there I was spending nine months publicising a film I’d done in three days. If that’s what was supposed to be the pinnacle of my career, it was 100 per cent not what I wanted.” She came very close to giving up acting completely, only returning to the industry after an extended sabbatical that included time doing yoga in India.
Today, Harris recognises that there is a way to manage the demands of fame without sacrificing her peace of mind. “I’ve realised I can do things on my own terms – I can simply say, ‘I’m not doing that anymore’,” she tells me. It means that when she does take on publicity jobs, the Bazaar shoot included, she can offer up her full self. She has found the confidence to own her right to stardom: her first lead role was in the 2019 action film Black and Blue, in which she plays a rookie police officer on the run, and this was followed by psychologically complex parts in the sci-fi romance Swan Song (2021) and the theatrical thriller The Wasp (2024), a story about female bullying that forced her to confront her personal childhood trauma. Where once she admits she was “really scared about the weight of carrying a whole movie”, and the “avalanche of attention” that might bring, she now feels comfortable with following her instincts when opportunities present themselves. “It’s never a cerebral decision – my whole life is ruled by the flow of feeling,” she reflects.
She will continue to plumb the depths of women’s experiences in her next project, Hysterical, a feminist comedy in which she stars as a mother seeking revenge on the Andrew Tate-inspired ‘alpha-male’ influencer who has sexually assaulted her daughter. Harris presented the script to her agent herself, after it was brought to her by a local friend whose writing she admired. As well as exploring the under-discussed topic of female rage, the show will touch on provocative, and potentially divisive, questions about male identity.
“My feeling is that a lot has been written and said about the challenges of being a woman today, and I think all of those points are incredibly valid,” proffers Harris carefully, “but not enough is being spoken about the challenges of being a man, about male suicide rates and that sense of being disconnected. I think it’s understandable that Andrew Tate could be highly attractive to men who are having a hard time, and I see him as a warning that we need to do more to focus on the plight of young men in particular.”
Given that Harris has been the driving force behind getting this narrative into production, it would be easy to conclude that she might want to diversify into writing, directing or producing. “My agents have often asked me whether I’d like to go down that route, but I’ve always felt that acting was my dream and it’s enough of a challenge for me,” she says. Instead, she is adding a new – and unexpected –string to her bow: launching an app. “And it’s all down to George Clooney – I blame him!” she says with a chuckle. It transpires that, while in Mykonos with the actor for a photo-shoot (they are both ambassadors for the luxury-watch brand Omega), she ended up having a heart-to-heart about her professional ambitions. “He made a beeline for me, and he spent about an hour talking to me about how I couldn’t just be an actress anymore, about how times had changed and I could do anything… I don’t know why he suspected this of me, but he said, ‘I know you have a voice and I know you’re not using it.’”
Clooney’s unsolicited pep talk got Harris thinking about what she might really like to do, and the idea of starting an app stayed with her. So when, much later, the opportunity arose to meet Lars Rasmussen, the pioneering software developer behind Google Maps, she jumped at the chance to pitch him her idea, which he loved. The app is now in development, and while Harris won’t reveal what exactly it is, she hints that it is designed to challenge “an industry that hasn’t had disruption since its inception”, as well as that it’s inspired by disappointing app-based experiences she has had in her private life. The idea of being the spokesperson for her product does not faze her: “What I find difficult is having to sell myself – I think I’ll be more fully myself when the attention is on the product instead of me.”
For those fearing that Harris’ venture into entrepreneurialism spells the end of her acting career, she is quick to offer reassurance. “I’ve had friends get a bit upset about what I’m doing because they don’t understand why, after I’ve worked so hard to get to the level of my profession I’m at now, I’d give it all up,” she acknowledges. “But I don’t think I’m giving anything up, because I think one kind of work will help the other. So for as long as I possibly can, I’ll do both.”
Hair by Rio Sreedharan
Make-up by Kenneth Soh at the Wall Group, using Ilia Beauty
All nails by Sabrina Gayle at Arch the Agency, using Chanel Le Vernis in 187 – Spirituelle and Chanel La Crème Main
Stylist’s assistant: Hadya Toufiq
Photographed at Raffles London at The OWO
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