Major spoilers below for Blink Twice.
You know when you see a woman get approached by a strange man in public, and you and her lock eyes in panic, secretly scheming a way to get her out even though you don’t know each other? That’s the kind of feeling Zoë Kravitz channeled in her directorial debut, Blink Twice. The thriller follows a cocktail waitress, Frida, played by Naomi Ackie, her best friend, and a handful of other beautiful women who get invited to vacation with a billionaire and his posse on his private island. As they soak up the lavish getaway—complete with free clothes, feasts from a private chef, and nightly dance parties—Frida starts to sense something is seriously wrong, and soon the rest of them do too.
It turns out their generous and charming host, Slater King (Channing Tatum), a disgraced tech scion who was canceled for bad behavior, owns this island for a diabolical reason: He and his friends bring women there and do whatever they want with them—or their bodies, rather—and then drug them with a scented perfume that erases their memories. Slater might’ve apologized for his past behavior publicly, and said he went to his island to “work on himself,” but really, he was just repeating his crimes, maybe even doing worse.
The cast of Blink Twice met with intimacy coordinators on days when they filmed graphic, sexually violent scenes, and supported each other on heavy days. “It was beautiful really,” Kravitz says in the press notes for the film. “Everyone really took care of each other. Things came up for different people, and it felt so supported by the crew, the cast, everybody.”
It’s easy to see the parallels between Slater and real men who’ve abused their power, issued an “apology,” disappeared for a while, and then quietly re-entered society like nothing happened. What does it mean if he said he “did the work”? Has he really earned our forgiveness or has just enough time passed that we’ve forgotten what he did? “It’s something that people can digest and then tell other people and talk about, and that’s what we want,” Naomi Ackie tells ELLE.com of the film’s themes.
“Conversation, that’s the goal,” Kravitz adds. “Whatever the conversation is, that’s up to you people, but I just want people to talk.”
Here, Kravitz and Ackie discuss the situations women are forced to smile through, forgiveness versus forgetting, and the final scene of the film.
At the premiere, Zoë, you said that you “couldn’t have asked for a better group of friends to play with” in this film. Given this is the first feature film that you directed, what were you looking for in your cast, and especially when it came to casting Slater and Frida?
Zoë Kravitz: I was looking for people who just really wanted to be there and knew why we were there, and people who truly understood what we were trying to make, because when you have to spend time explaining it to people, it’s kind of a waste of time, versus we both know what we’re doing, so now we’re just one-upping each other and adding and adding and adding. That’s where the play comes in. And the script is so strange and specific. I keep on using this metaphor, but I think it really works: The script is a destination wedding where a lot of people don’t get it, and they won’t come, but you don’t want them there anyway. And so the people who show up, I’m like, “You are my people. You’re who I want here. We’re going to have fun.”
And Naomi, what was it like for you to be able to play with this group?
Naomi Ackie: I mean, it was just joy. The interesting thing about joy is that it doesn’t always feel good. The foundation was joy. We were so passionate about what we were making day-to-day. We were going through it.
Kravitz: I know. It was a lot.
Ackie: It was a lot. We were in Mexico, the heat, the complications. Things go wrong on sets all the time, but it was always coming from a place of love for the script and for the story, for Zoë as a leader. So all I can really remember is us just claiming the space, making it our own, just immersing ourselves in whatever situation we’d be in, and then just being so down.
It does seem like the preface, the baseline, of the film is joy, but there are also a lot of heavier themes. Zoë, you started writing the script in 2017, but even now, it feels very timely. Where did the idea come from? Was it a reaction to #MeToo and the men who got away without taking accountability?
Kravitz: Well, this was before a lot of those things happened, the summer of 2017. So #MeToo was a thing, but wasn’t as loud as it became, for example, in October of that year. It wasn’t an idea. It was a feeling or many feelings that I didn’t really have a place to put. And again, being a woman in this industry in rooms with very powerful people and witnessing different kinds of behavior and having my own experiences, I just felt like I needed to explore that, even just for myself. I wasn’t thinking about making a movie. I wasn’t thinking about finishing the script. I was just like, “Let me just write some shit down, because I don’t want to hold this anymore.” Because my back hurts. [Laughs]
And then the story just kept evolving and kept evolving. It was interesting starting to write something, and then the world kept changing, the conversation kept changing, the zeitgeist kept changing, and so I kept on having to change the characters and the dynamics, and that was really interesting to be working with something that was so current. It was this buzzing thing that was alive.
But it’s about now, it’s about then, it’s about the future. A lot of the island aspect of it is a complete coincidence. I wanted to isolate the characters, so I was thinking about things like Lord of the Flies, the Garden of Eden, the whole concept of the serpent and the flower. It had nothing to do with the people that people think this is about.
Naomi, how did that resonate with you as you were reading the script and inhabiting the character?
Ackie: When I read the script, I was like, this speaks to a part of me that I don’t even speak on, because it’s so common that no one even bothers to speak about it.
[Kravitz uses] that amazing analogy of when you’re in a club and some dickhead is just obviously ignoring the fact that you don’t want to speak to them, and you just stare at your friend or a woman [who’s a stranger], anyone, and you’re like, “Help me.”
Kravitz: And they’re like, “Girl, you okay?” And you’re like, “No.” And I’m like, “Why are we doing this silently?”
Ackie: I had to save a woman on the tube once, late at night. There was this guy who was chatting up this woman across from me. She didn’t want it. He started making fun of her nose. It was so weird, and I just turned to him and was like, “She doesn’t want to talk to you. What are you doing?” I said [to the woman], “Hey, come sit next to me.” We got off the train together. I was like, “Which direction are you going? Because the guys are still behind us.” We had to both shepherd ourselves to a space while they passed and then went our separate ways.
Kravitz: That’s normal.
Ackie: That’s normal!
Kravitz: I was at the airport the other day, and a guy came up to the woman that worked at Delta and started touching her. But it was crazy that we both knew. Me and her had a whole conversation with our eyes, and the guy had no idea, and then we handled it. The fact that we all know to do that is crazy. And why aren’t we just like, “Hey, dude, stop”?
Ackie: It’s crazy when something is so normal, and it feels so revolutionary at the same time, right? We’re talking on a very common feeling, and yet no one has talked about it. Therefore, this [film] is revolutionary. I was like, “Let’s speak on truth.” I think that’s my motivation in my actual life. And especially as an actor, I want to tell the truth, even if it’s uncomfortable for people. And we talked about that. It was like, “Let’s just burn some shit up. Shall we just set light to something?”
I feel like everybody has an experience like that.
Kravitz: But it happens all the time, and it’s crazy that we normalize it. We normalize having to speak without speaking because we’re uncomfortable or afraid to do it. We normalize having to smile through things that are uncomfortable and being told to smile through the pain. And we’ve normalized pretending like everything’s okay, and it’s not.
It’s out of your own safety too, because if you’re mean, if you’re aggressive back, you don’t know what can happen to you.
Ackie: Also, I think what’s so interesting about female aggression is that you don’t have to do much for someone to deem you being aggressive. You could just be like, “Hey, I don’t like that.” And they’re like, “Whoa, whoa.”
Kravitz: “Whoa, what’s your problem?”
Ackie: Like I pulled out a machete or something.
There were some very telling lines in the dialogue, like, “Forgetting is a gift,” “There’s no forgiveness, just forgetting,” and I thought that was very clever and very pointed. If someone is accused of bad behavior, sometimes no work has to be done; just a good PR campaign or they go away for a long time, then they come back and continue working. What it was like exploring that theme about forgiveness and forgetting?
Kravitz: The thing I was interested by is, really, it’s both sides of the coin. Obviously there’s shades. I want to be clear too, there’s shades of bad behavior that we’re talking about, levels to it. But I don’t think we, as a culture, have created an environment where people who do things that are bad learn anything. I think we just get mad at them, and then we throw them away. But we also want them to apologize, but we also don’t forgive them, and we don’t teach them anything. We’re just kind of moving stuff around. It’s like when you sweep, and you’re just kind of like, “Am I cleaning, or am I just moving dust to different places?” That’s kind of what it feels like, and I wanted to just kind of explore that. If we don’t teach people how to evolve, if we don’t find a way to communicate to them, people continue to do the same behavior quietly. Now people just do things in the dark, and that’s not how things change, and so I wanted to look at that.
Ackie: In the wilderness, there’s a [process] where you can purify water, and you put salt at the bottom [of a container] and then some small pebbles and then bigger rocks, and you put the dirty water in. And it shifts and trickles down, and it gets cleaner and cleaner and cleaner. To me, it speaks to the evolution of the script, even what you’re talking about earlier. Yes, catcalling is bad, we all know that now, or grabbing a woman in the middle of a street is bad. Don’t do that. How it changes over time, though, is that that thing becomes bad and then it’s refined down to something smaller but comes from the same place.
Kravitz: Because they don’t understand why. When a man tells you to smile on the street and we lose it, they’re like, “What’s the problem?” Because they don’t understand. I don’t think they really understand.
Ackie: So it’s about trying to investigate the core of the thing, because without anyone understanding the core of it—which is ultimately: if you continue to deem other people lesser than because of whatever reason that you’ve been conditioned and don’t understand that you are under the thumb of [that] too—we are all going to keep doing this to each other. That thing will just refine itself into different things, and I think it reflects in the way that the apologist thing happens. We just say sorry, and you say, “I take accountability, and I’m doing the work.” Everyone says, “You just got to do the work." You’re like, “What is that?”
Kravitz: Let’s dive into that.
Ackie: Yeah, what is that? We’ve got all of this rhetoric around therapy and who’s “toxic,” or everyone likes to say “narcissist” without understanding the therapeutic diagnosis. So, all of that kind of stuff, we have the words; we don’t have the meaning.
Kravitz: And understanding.
Ackie: We have to have the understanding before we can actually move forward.
Frida’s decision at the end—to spare Slater’s life and apparently take over the company—is that in response to this understanding? Is she achieving justice rather than revenge? Is it a matter of: Women shouldn’t just get rid of their oppressors but should also be the ones in power?
Kravitz: I mean, I like that it’s up for interpretation. She says at the beginning of the film that her mom used to tell her success is the best revenge. I think that she decides that she wants her life to be better in that moment, but then I think there’s the question of: Is her life better? Is she continuing a cycle, or is she ending one? And was it worth it? I leave those questions open to the audience for a reason.
Ackie: We talked about The Power, that book by Naomi Alderman. What is also interesting is looking at humanity, people in general, and being like, “Okay, if power was thrust into anyone’s hand, what would you actually do with it?” Because I think being on the side of the coin where it feels like things are happening to us as women, sometimes I lose sight of the fact that if I did have power, there is a possibility and potentially a high possibility that I could be doing the same thing...We have to know that we are capable of a similar thing. And to me, the ending plays with that idea as a potential, and it is really ambiguous. But for me, I found it really interesting like, “Huh, Frida has power now. What is she going to do with it?”
Kravitz: Because power is innately oppressive. In order for someone to be on the top, someone has to be at the bottom. And we have all been conditioned to fight to be at the top. And it’s like, “We deserve it. We deserve it. We deserve it,” but we don’t want to look at the fact that we’re stepping on people’s heads to get there, and it’s complicated.
When I walked away from the film, I felt like, this is a really strong message for women, but there’s a strong message for men here as well. Did you have any audiences in mind that you hope take away something from the story?
Kravitz: This film is for everybody, and I think that what’s so exciting about it is that everyone can have a different experience. I think women will feel seen and validated and that this is for us, and I hope men feel like they’ve learned something. This film is definitely not meant to alienate men. It’s not a lecture. I’m not wagging my finger at anybody. I love men. I have so many male friends that I’m so close with and a lot of men, which I’ve been really excited by, have watched this film and said, “Oh, this is so helpful. I understand.” That’s great.
I had a friend watch the film, and he was like, “At first I was like, ‘Oh, this is so fantastical and cool with the snake,’ and then I realized, ‘Oh, it’s a metaphor, and you guys go through this all the time.’” And it was so nice to see. Sometimes we have to take the time to put things into a language or a perspective that other people can understand, and so I think everyone will have a different experience, and hopefully they’re good ones.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Blink Twice is in theaters now.
