Spotlight on actress Naomi Scott
British actress goes from Disney princess to action star in her new film
NEW ROLE The 26-year-old, who earlier this year graced the big screen as Princess Jasmine in the Aladdin remake, is now fighting bad guys in the new Charlie’s Angels reboot.
“I know it’s hilarious,” she said recently. “I’m doing a lot of reboots. It’s like, ‘We need to reboot this film with a brown person – Nay [Naomi], you free?’”
Directed by Elizabeth Banks, who also plays Bosley in the movie, Charlie’s Angels co-stars Naomi’s fellow Londoner Ella Balinska and Kristen Stewart, who complete the trio of crime-fighters.
“It’s a movie about women at work,” Naomi says. “Team players who uplift one another. It’s not about their boyfriends they didn’t see enough, or the cats they didn’t feed or their mother they didn’t call.”
WOMAN POWER “As a kid I just yearned to do this type of role,” says Naomi, who was born to a mother of Gujarati-Indian descent and an English father.
“Me and my friend would always play spies, but seeing a woman on screen solving her own problems, being a badass, a superhero, was so rare.
“I actually felt emotional when I saw Robin Wright and Gal Gadot go at it in Wonder Woman. Regardless of the kind of movies you like, that’s empowering.”
Naomi comes from a family of strong women. Her grandmother, born in Uganda to Indian parents, left the country during Idi Amin’s brutal regime in the ’70s. “My nan, in all her strength, came to England and said to her 10 daughters, ‘You can marry whoever you want.’ She was forward thinking. My aunties embody that now – and that extends to me too.”
ON DIVERSITY She’s endured her fair share of prejudice. “In auditions I’ve had those comments, ‘She’s kind of exotic; we don’t know what she is.’ Like I was too white for one person, and too nonwhite for another.” But she says the industry is changing. “We’re seeing films with female leads making millions, movies with predominantly black casts making millions, and that’s exciting. It’s going in the right direction, but a business like that takes time to change. “The people making the decisions need to have different perspectives.”