“I don’t remember when I learnt the lines to Whitney’s music,” Naomi Ackie says. “I can’t remember ever sitting down and rewinding them, but most of her popular songs I know completely off by heart.”
Many of us feel the same about Whitney Houston. If you walked the earth round the turn of the millennium, songs such as Saving All My Love for You, How Will I Know and I Will Always Love You just ate their way into your psyche. It was as if they had always been there. A decade and a bit after Houston’s tragic death at just 48, Ackie, a charismatic, talkative actor from northeast London, finds herself playing Houston in a biopic entitled — what else? — I Wanna Dance with Somebody.
She proves up to the task. Ackie is not asked to replicate the incomparable singing voice, but it was challenge enough to walk us through that tempestuous life. Early breakthrough as the child of gospel singer Cissy Houston and protege of the legendary impresario Clive Davis. Spectacular success as a “crossover” artist. Noisy marriage to the R&B star Bobby Brown. Grim struggle with substance abuse.
“It was important to highlight the highs and the lows,” Ackie says. “It’s definitely a balance. Nobody’s life is just airy-fairy and dreamy. We all go through difficulties. Those are as important as the high moments. That’s a balance. It was about making sure what I did was truthful.”
There is a lot to unpick in a life that — subject of two controversial documentaries — is still cloaked in controversy. Early on, the film introduces us to Robyn Crawford (played by Nafessa Williams), who worked as assistant to Houston and was a close companion until the singer’s career really took off and she married Brown. The nature of their relationship is still much discussed. Kasi Lemmons, director of I Wanna Dance with Somebody, has been in and around the movie business for over 40 years. She began as an actor before going on to direct the much-admired Eve’s Bayou in 1997. She was adamant that the picture put Crawford near the centre.
“It was very important to me,” she tells me. “I wouldn’t have done the movie if it hadn’t been included. I was a young actor in New York during Whitney’s rise to fame. We all knew about it. She was always with Robyn. There was lots of talk that she had a relationship with Robyn. Certainly, they were incredibly close. That was something we could all see. It was taken for granted. So that when she married Bobby, we were all, like, ‘What about Robyn?’”
Lemmons explains that she met Houston around 1994 to discuss a film project and that Crawford was with her at the time.
“I think they felt a lot of pressure from the outside world and that is something she struggled with.”
The film is light on its feet as regards that relationship, but few will be in any doubt where Anthony McCarten’s screenplay stands. Attitudes have changed a great deal since the height of Houston’s popularity. They have changed even more since her death.
“I think at that time it was a difficult thing to admit that you were sexually fluid,” Lemmons says. “Now everybody talks about it. Right? We’re so used to it now that it’s interesting to be reminded there were times when people really had to make decisions about how they wanted to be perceived. There were people saying: ‘This is me.’ There were others who were a little bit more careful about their image. She had pressure within the family to present herself in a certain way.”
The notion of how Houston was “presented” is a key theme in I Wanna Dance with Somebody. You also hear it discussed in those two fine documentaries by prominent British filmmakers: Nick Broomfield’s Whitney: Can I Be Me and Kevin Macdonald’s Whitney. Arriving a decade or so after hip-hop broke through, Houston was set up as an unthreatening pop figure with appeal across the social spectrum. She would sell out stadiums. She would deliver a famously operatic Star Spangled Banner at the 1991 Superbowl. Her songs would tinkle in the background as you shopped in a suburban mall.
Not everyone in the African-American community bought it. Jeering at the Soul Train Awards in 1989 was read as criticism of her not being “black enough”. Lemmons is happy to tackle that argument.
“I think I have a lot of complicated thoughts about it,” she says. “The crossing over that she did was a major accomplishment. It was tremendous. She really became a global crossover. That’s a tremendous accomplishment for an African-American artist. And yet, there were questions. Was she being authentic to herself? Was she giving us what we deserve as black people? I think that that was harsh. I think we have to look at that and look at how we view celebrity. We have to look at what we’re asking of the people that we also idolise.”
Some may argue the film goes a little easy on Bobby Brown. In the aftermath of Houston’s death — she accidentally drowned in her bathtub — many blamed the singer for her escalating drug use. McCarten’s screenplay features a late scene in which Houston tells Brown that the media treated him unfairly and that she was a drug user before they ever met. Was that a conscious corrective?
“Well, yeah, that was very important to me,” Lemmons says. “That was important to Anthony and to everybody. It’s Whitney that says that: ‘The drugs were there before you. We didn’t help each other. But I don’t blame you for that.’ I think that that was a really Important thing to say. I think Bobby gets vilified for being the person who brought her down with drugs. And that’s just not true. Drugs were a Whitney thing. It was always a part of her life.”
That impression was almost certainly reinforced by the presenting, early on, of Houston as a clean-cut, polished star for the America of Ronald Reagan and the first Bush presidency. The world found it hard to credit that she was susceptible to the same temptations that dogged everyday mortals. Hollywood and the music industry has always done this and we keep falling for it. Lemmons notes that, when she first met Whitney all those years ago, she also met her father, John Houston. She tells me about an “interesting dynamic”. She remembers him discussing Whitney’s “brand”.
“There was no question that Whitney was branded as America’s princess, America’s sweetheart,” Lemmons says. “And that she played that role with enthusiasm. Her father had a hand in crafting that with her. It wasn’t all the way true to who she was authentically. She became more authentic as time went on.”
So there is a lot for Ackie to take on. Raised in Walthamstow, the daughter of second-generation Grenadian immigrants, she studied at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama — alma mater of Judi Dench and Vanessa Redgrave — before securing a breakthrough role opposite Florence Pugh in William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth. She moves on from the current film to a role opposite Robert Pattinson in Bong Joon-ho’s already much buzzed-about science fiction flick Mickey 17.
Ackie seems admirably assured. But she can’t help but have felt pressure when she embarked on I Wanna Dance with Somebody.
“I think it came in waves,” she says. “When I first started shooting, the pressure melted away. But then I would work my way up to a harder scene and then it would crank up a little bit. You get on a set and the pace is usually quite slow. That gives you a lot of time to regulate yourself. So there were definitely moments where I tried to calm myself or sought support from other people.”
I am fascinated by the process of miming to such a powerful voice. Presumably she has to actually sing along to playback. If she wasn’t making a noise it wouldn’t look right. Was she wailing like a maniac during those scenes?
“I am wailing away like a maniac,” she says merrily. “Most of the time I asked John [Warhurst, sound man] to crank up the music, so they could only hear Whitney. I don’t want them to hear me trying for a pitch I can’t reach. Ha, ha!”
Now the film goes out in the world. Following successes such as Rocketman and Bohemian Rhapsody (also from a script by Anthony McCarten) the world seems eager for the singalong biopic. But there is more to the Whitney saga. What would Ackie like people to take away from this often sad story?
“There are many things to be learned,” she says. “We all have different gifts that we’re given — that we’re just blessed with when we’re born. If handled correctly they can give us a lot of joy. But it’s also something that can cause imbalance.”
I get a sense Ackie is pretty grounded.
“It’s very different when it’s your voice and it’s your body,” she says. “That’s something that is sold in a very specific way. You have to educate yourself about that and make sure that’s what you really want. I guess that’s what I’ve been learning and will continue to learn about.”
She smiles awkwardly.
“To make sure that I have as rich a career as Whitney did.”
I Wanna Dance with Somebody is on limited release from St Stephen’s Day, then goes on general release on Friday, December 30th
