Naomi Ackie was once asked by a former manager to change her “afro hair” for auditions in the hopes she would “look like I’m mixed-race,” the actress revealed in a recent interview.
During the “Clayface” press junket, Ackie was asked by The Independent about the most brutal note she’d received from a casting director while auditioning for a project. She didn’t have an answer to that but remembered a different story she warned was “dark, actually.”
“I have afro hair, and this is crazy, but I was doing a string of auditions where I was just having my hair in its normal state because if you braid too much and stuff like that it can damage your hair,” Ackie said. “I just wasn’t getting anything for about a year. I wasn’t getting to the second round. And my manager at the time – I was just like, ‘I really don’t know what I’m doing and I want progress but I don’t know’ – and she was like, ‘Uh, you know, I thought you should change your hair.”
She continued: “This is dark. And she was like, ‘Maybe you should get some wigs or something that would add a softer curl to it.’ And I said, ‘Do you want me to look like I’m mixed-race?’ And she went, ‘Yeah.’”
This had both the interviewer and co-star Max Minghella’s jaw dropped.
“And she’s still her manager,” Minghella joked. “Fireable offense!”
“At the time I was young and I didn’t say anything,” Ackie admitted. “I did get the wigs, and unfortunately, it helped. But now I don’t have to luckily … This business is bleak.”
“Clayface” is the latest in the James Gunn and Peter Safran era of DC Comics movies. It tells the origin story of one of Batman’s most iconic villains – an actor who alters his body following a horrific attack that makes his body malleable as clay and lets him shape-shift as others.
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