Naomi Scott on Heroines and Hysteria

Naomi Scott has the distinct quality of a Roman coin, her raw intelligence flashing to a polished work ethic at an angle. Her acting is adeptly encompassing, the same way Catherine Deneuve saturates the screen in my favorite psychological masterpiece Repulsion by Roman Polanski. Both actresses’ sheer range of emotion bewilders and leaves you feeling stripped. The architecture of the damned glossed up by a sacred history of heroines comes hysteria.

 

 

I recall a few lines from an interview with Parker Finn, the writer and director of the Smile enterprise. He’d professed an immediate creative connection with Naomi, who would become the lead of his freshly harrowing contribution to the canon of cinematic horror. Naomi lights up and pours out a telling of the instant spark that became a shared language between them. Parker had warned that it would be a profoundly difficult role, which translated to a prize catch in her view; she longed to be pushed in her acting if it was born of pure artistry.

 

 

Smile 2 is concerned with layers of meta-reality becoming flawed, flipped, and foundational to your belief in the film’s arc of drama, the artifice of horror wearing it like a veil. Naomi is a singer in her own right and, unbeknownst to her at the start, the script was based on a pop star. She co-wrote an original set of songs for the film from the perspective of her character, Skye Riley, which she performs in the feature. It’s as if she and Parker were in their own meta-reality before the lights even went up for the first take. I suspect this bond is why the eventual delivery is cohesive in its belief system. The true art of horror is to suddenly abandon reality and feel genuine emotional depths—compassion when werewolves feel guilty the morning after, or sympathy when Dracula is isolated in the dark.

 

 

Lonely red patent heels keep Naomi company as our photographer tilts with her nuanced expressions of quiet hysteria embodied. She shifts her weight and becomes another and another in character and fixated gaze. Her ability to mimic elements of her character is uncanny. She’s a hollowed-out and breathless walking daydream conjuring a nightmare she has had on screen.

She claims Mia Farrow as an influence and my mind spins as she turns a cheek in echoes of danger that stick to the film. She’s now made the film itself a character that drips with the psychological thrill caused by being a witness to your own demise. The film’s end finds Naomi’s character begging for her life as an imagined force swallows her whole with its own ideas of a solution. This may explain her minor reaction to plates cracking in her honor on our set. She has mastered the calm cadence of hysterical grief endured.

 

 

Naomi aptly describes the film as a story of grief. Her character suffers in a prison of fame where she isn’t allowed to feel authentic emotions for a living. As the film spirals, she holds it taut and attempts to stave off her spirit’s demise. It’s a guttural performance; you feel stricken with empathy until you’re shaken with classic floor-dropping fear. Before we spoke, I imagined that it might be tempting to ask her firstly about the master, Jack Nicholson, whose son plays a profound role in the film and unnervingly echoes his Father in aesthetic bombast. However, she deservedly holds the weight of the film—it’s a stacked character study where she must dance and cry and scratch and smile without breaking, trapped by elusive demons crawling on her nerves and in turn on yours as witness. Naomi is a graceful force with whom one can get lost musing on cinematic theory. Set lights dim on her precise silhouette immured in a sculpted black dress as the camera captures her devotion to métier as its own living entity.

 

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