Naomi Ackie (I Wanna Dance With Somebody, Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker, Small Axe, Mickey 17, The Thursday Murder Club) stars in Boots Riley’s anti-capitalist satire I Love Boosters, part of the 70th edition of the BFI London Film Festival (LFF), which runs through Oct. 18. But on Saturday, she discussed not only her new film, which features her opposite the likes of Keke Palmer, Demi Moore, Don Cheadle and Taylour Paige, but also her broader career experiences and insights into the acting profession during an LFF Screen Talk.

During the session, moderated by Grace Barber-Plentie, BFI London Film Festival programmer, the star repeatedly drew applause and laughter from an adoring crowd that left the room buzzing about Ackie’s passion and natural charisma.

One recurring theme was the actress’ seamless move between smaller U.K. productions and Hollywood movies, as well as between film and series.

Ackie shared that she enjoys this variety of opportunities but also acknowledged that she feels most at home in the U.K. capital’s industry circles. “The London film scene feels like home,” and running into old friends and acquaintances feels “so comfortable,” she told the audience. “I feel, controversially maybe, [that] in America, it feels like Hollywood, and Hollywood is not a thing that I’m particularly stimulated by. It’s a machine, and I respect it, but it’s not necessarily the thing that makes me feel the most comfortable.”

Barber-Plentie pointed out that many of the U.S. directors that Ackie has worked with started with smaller independent films.

The star shared that this may also explain one of her recent favorites. “I’m obsessed with Obsession,” she told the London audience. “You look at that director [Curry Barker] – he’s been doing YouTube shorts for the longest time!”

Speaking of horror movies, Ackie mentioned that she was off to L.A. later in the day to start promoting Clayface. “Has anyone seen It Follows,” she also asked, drawing many shouts of “yes” from the crowd. “The sequel [They Follow], I just finished this summer.”

Her approach to genre films: “I just love doing horror because it’s actually the funniest job,” she told the LFF Screen Talk. “I said to my team: ‘Guys, maybe I should ease up on the horror.’ Horror is popping right now. It’s the best genre right now.”

Ackie also offered her take on what has been driving the popularity of horror films, namely war and other horrors in the news. “I think it’s because, as a global community, we are extremely anxious. Did you see that tornado in Sydney?” she said before sharing her own worries. “Also, everyone, get your tins! Please, get your tins of food and your water. I’m not even joking. I bought a crank radio. … And the candles. I’ve got matches, magic straws just in case the water gets dirty.” The actress emphasized, though: “I’m afraid, but I don’t want to put that on you.”

Ackie didn’t only discuss horror, but also comedy during her appearance, including I Love Boosters. “I love a female friendship,” she offered in expressing the joy she felt on the set. “Representing female friendship is a special thing.”

A special experience of a very different sort was, of course, her work on Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker. She recalled how she felt she wouldn’t get the role, as she has done after various other auditions, only to get a surprise call back. But the actress highlighted that even Star Wars and other big roles didn’t change certain things for her. “It didn’t change me from the inside,” she explained. “I still live exactly the same, and that was eye-opening.”

Ackie also shared on Saturday that the, or one of the, hardest roles she has ever taken on was playing Whitney Houston in I Wanna Dance With Somebody. “I’m a perfectionist, and this shit sent me crazy because you can never know a person,” she recalled. “It was something about the pressure of people knowing Whitney, people loving Whitney, me playing her. Am I good enough? This is a mountain. I remember saying to my sister: ‘I feel like I’m a baby looking at the top of a mountain, and somehow I need to crawl up to the top.’”

Concluded Ackie: “It was probably the most difficult part, but I look back at the film now, and I’m like: ‘Good for you!’ That’s probably one of the favorite things I’ve ever done. The reviews weren’t the most incredible; the box office didn’t do great, but for me personally, it changed my approach to my craft. Because once you do something like that, I was like: ‘Give me anything!’ … Because I know I’ve probably done one of the hardest things I can in my life.”

At 35, Ackie has done so many different things, but there are some roles that she would like to take on in the future. Recalling how she grew up loving West Side Story and Grease, the actress said: “I really would love to be in a musical. I just love it. It offers so much joy to me.”

She also recalled how her character in Lady Macbeth, opposite Florence Pugh and Cosmo Jarvis, becomes mute halfway through the movie. “It taught me that we communicate a lot with our bodies and not with the words we say, and I still use that to this day,” Ackie said. “I was chatting to Lashana [Lynch] the other day, and I was like: ‘My dream is to do a film where I don’t say anything.’ And she said: ‘Me too.’ I feel like a lot of actors might feel that way.”

Gentle Monster writer-director Marie Kreutzer and star Léa Seydoux took to the stage at Deadline’s Contenders London event to discuss the journey behind their Cannes drama.

Seydoux plays Lucy, an experimental pianist who moves with her beloved but panic attack-liable husband Philip (Laurence Rupp) and young son to a rural farmhouse in Bavaria. Life seems swell until a special unit of big-city police led by Detective Kühn (Jella Haase) swoop in and seize one of Philip’s devices. As expected, they find and seize thousands of images of child pornography — and his double life is exposed. Catherine Deneuve plays Lucy’s mother in the feature.

The project has a striking resonance for Kreutzer. In 2022, the Austrian director released Corsage, starring Vicky Krieps and Florian Teichtmeister. The following year, Teichtmeister was arrested and pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography: 76,000 files spread over 22 devices. He received a suspended sentence, which outraged many Austrians horrified by the crime committed by a prominent cultural figure. Inevitably, Kreutzer’s film was tarnished by association and even withdrawn from some cinemas.

How did that experience shape Gentle Monster?

Kreutzer explained today that she “started working on Gentle Monster in 2020, after reading an article in a German newspaper about a ring of criminals being uncovered in Germany. So when all that happened with the actor, I knew so much about the issue, and it was a very disturbing coincidence. I thought, ‘I can’t make the film anymore’, because it will always be connected to an actor, but sometime later, I realized it’s maybe more of a reason to make the film and to confront it and not run away from it.”

Seydoux described why she was drawn to the film: “I loved the script. I thought it was well written and and very subtle, because the subject is obviously a tough subject, and it’s not that easy to make a film about a subject like this one. I love the fact that it was told through the woman’s perspective, and that it’s through her eyes that the the story formed. It’s not through the victim’s perspective or through the perpetrator’s perspective. I thought that was extremely interesting because I was able to to express very contradictory feelings and a large range of different emotions.”

She described the revelation at the heart of the movie as “a horrible thing” that creates “an earthquake inside” her character.

The actress said that among the most challenging practical aspects of the film were speaking German and the concert scenes where she has to play the piano.

Kreutzer agreed that the concert scene was among the most difficult to capture: “The big concert scene was a really hard thing for for both Lea and me because she’s a very intuitive actress, which I love, and I’m a very intuitive director, and less technical. I know what I need to know, but I don’t want any marks for the actors, I want them to move freely, so don’t plan shots in millimeters. That’s not how I do it. And so when you’re shooting a scene like that, you have to do that. It was a day where I felt like it was out of my hands and I can’t really do anything and everyone’s really stressed.”

Kreutzer also described a “wild day” when Seydoux, who doesn’t drive, had to drive a car in reverse with a child in the back seat.

Netflix acquired the film as Cannes was wrapping up in May and opens it October 30 in limited release before it starts streaming on November 18. Alexander Glehr and Johanna Scherz are the producers.

Writer-director Guy Nattiv and actress Carrie Coon joined Deadline’s Contenders London event today where the pair discussed making The Liberation, a very personal story inspired by real events from Nattiv’s own grandmother.

The film, which Bleecker Street is releasing in in the U.S. in January, is set in the early 1980s where Rita, a depressed New Jersey bank worker and Holocaust survivor (Coon), is lured into an all-female woodland commune by a charismatic leader (Lily James), while her daughters attempt a rescue.

“I was only eight when my family took me to seminars to see my grandmother and participate with her in those meetings,” said Nattiv. “I didn’t know what it meant. It was like dancing with people in the dark. I heard horrific stories from people, and my grandmother crying, it was so weird to me. But no one told me what it was exactly, and I didn’t know until I became a teenager when my family had basically broken in front of my eyes, and my grandmother left my grandfather, left our family, and just joined this. Now, we know it was a cult but at the time we didn’t know what it was.”

Nattiv said that when he was older and was processing these events as a film student, he started asking a lot of questions but didn’t get a lot of answers. It was a decade ago that he decided to take his camera and visit the cult after his grandmother had passed away. “I asked questions and I got answers…ish.”

He entered the process with “a lot of empathy” and found that the cult “tried to free her” from her trauma of being a Holocaust survivor. “She had the courage to do something very uncommon: To leave your family, say goodbye to your daughters and your husband and go into the unknown and try to save yourself.”

Coon admitted she was “absolutely fascinated by the story” and said she watched “hours and hours” of footage from Yad Vashem and from Shoah Foundation testimonies, “particularly women from Poland,” to help her research for the role of Rita.

“There’s something very specific about the way the recounting of those unspeakable things is held in the body,” said Coon. “And also, the stories themselves, the myriad forms of trauma that were inflicted upon people. But then also that they were resilient enough to survive was also very fascinating and people had a find a way to survive and Rita had a very particular idea about what that looked like for herself…who are we to say what is required for someone to move on?”

Coon continued that it was helpful for her to view the story as “a love story.”

“What I became very fascinated by with reading is the idea that these social rules we are living by are tacit agreements,” she said. “There’s nothing written down. We wake up in the morning and we’re a wife and a mother and we follow all of these rules. But it’s all made up. We could essentially walk away from our lives at any time, but we don’t do it. And we did [in this film]. I just find that brave and shocking.”

Check back on Monday for the panel video.