The film, which co-stars Stanley Tucci, chronicles legendary singer's swift rise to fame and soul-sapping challenges that followed
The fact that “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” star Naomi Ackie looks nothing like Whitney Houston, the subject of the new film Ackie stars in, proved to be a distinct advantage for the English actress and for “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” director Kasi Lemmons. The film opens in San Diego and nationwide on Friday.Because I don’t look like Whitney at all,” said the charismatic Ackie, speaking during a Zoom interview last week from New York.
“The first time I saw Whitney in a video,” Lemmons recalled, “I thought: ‘She’s so beautiful, so effervescent, and her voice is magnificent She’ll be a huge star.’ First and foremost, they had to find a balance between the heady triumphs Houston achieved — as a music and film icon with a storybook-like rise to global stardom — and the soul-sapping lows she later endured. Those included drug addiction, clashes with her domineering father-cum-manager, financial problems, a tumultuous marriage to fellow singer Bobby Brown, and Houston’s closeted affair with her close friend, Robyn Crawford.
“I look at every life as kind of Shakespearean because we all are very similar,” said Lemmons, who last year replaced Stella Meghie as “I Wanna Dance with Somebody’s” director. “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody” star Naomi Ackie is shown at the 2020 EE British Academy Film Awards in London.To prepare for her starring role in last year’s Oscar-nominated “The United States Vs. Billie Holiday,” San Diego-bred singer and actress Andra Day started smoking and drinking, the better to more realistically portray legendary blues and jazz vocal great Holiday. Day also spent time with recovering addicts to gain insights into their lives and their debilitating habits.
“I didn’t smoke cigarettes ,” Ackie said. “But, yes, I did a lot of research into addiction, what it does to the body, how it feels. I watched a lot of interviews about that and had the privilege to talk to Whitney’s family and people who knew her and worked with her outside of addictions.The screenplay for “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” was written by two-time Academy Award nominee Anthony McCarten.
Davis co-produced “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” He is also a key supporting character, heroically portrayed by Stanley Tucci, in a film that presents Davis’ recollections as unquestioned fact. “I thought that was tremendously interesting and enriching. Clive is a wealth of knowledge and he brought all that. And Rickey ... was also a wealth of knowledge.”
In a 1986 Union-Tribune interview, Houston said: “I wouldn’t want a man who was hard or obnoxious or rambunctious.” In hindsight, that seems like a prescient description of her future husband, Bobby Brown, whose tumultuous marriage to Houston generates some of the most tense moments in the film. They were married in 1992 and divorced in 2007. Their daughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown, died in 2015 at the age of 22.
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