Naomi Ackie gets to be weird in Mickey 17. Onscreen, that’s rare for a Black woman. And Ackie knows that the ability to star in a sci-fi blockbuster, directed by acclaimed auteur Bong Joon Ho (Parasite), opposite Robert Pattinson, as an “unhinged in the best of ways” character is an opportunity that, while deserved, doesn’t come often in Hollywood – especially for actors who look like her. As Nasha, the love interest to Pattinson’s aloof Mickey, she plays a security agent who is as protective as she is unfiltered and, as she put it, “unhinged.” Nasha is wild, extremely weird, and an enforcer in a futuristic universe where civilian space travel to another planet sets it apart from our current reality, but a psychotic tyrannical politician with a god complex (Mark Ruffalo’s Kenneth Marshall) makes it feel eerily familiar. Adapted from Ashton Edward’s 2022 science-fiction novel, Bong’s quirky and ferociously entertaining Mickey 17 tells the story of an out-of-luck underachiever, Mickey Barnes (Pattinson), who accidentally volunteers to travel to a new planet to act as a guinea pig on a spaceship, meaning that he dies repeatedly, and each time he does, his body is regenerated (when the movie opens, he’s gone through the process, you guessed it, 17 times) through a 3D printer — memories and all — to do it all over again.
