Despite hating guns, Harris stars as a tough cop up for a fight in her new action thriller. She talks about how she almost quit acting after Moonlight, the pain of her family’s past and Bond getting woke
Later this month, Naomie Harris appears in her first starring role in a film. She is 43. What has taken her so long? Not laziness. Harris has always been a grafter, acting on TV from the age of nine, saving every penny to pay for university (social and political science at Cambridge, one of only two black students in her year). The work ethic, she says, comes from her mother, who discovered she was pregnant when doing her A-levels and raised her daughter solo, funded by a job at the post office. She later went to university, worked as a scriptwriter on EastEnders and is now a reiki healer.
So, Harris is no slouch. But for years she told her agents: supporting roles only. No leads. “I get consumed by the characters that I play, and acting is quite a stressful, adrenaline-inducing thing. So I didn’t really know how well I would cope with being a lead. It was partly a confidence issue, as well. I just thought I’d be biting off more than I could chew.”