Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut, “Blink Twice,” is a party-turned-nightmare about the want of power, the abuse of power and taking power back. The film features a captivating performance from Naomi Ackie as Frida, a complicated heroine who challenges victim narratives.
On why she cast Ackie as her film’s main character, Frida, Kravitz says that Ackie brought a sweetness to Frida that she wasn’t expecting. “It was a bigger leap than I was thinking originally from the badass that she becomes,” Kravitz says of Ackie’s performance. “There’s a big innocence to her that’s part of her face too.”
For the other main character, Slater King, Kravitz wanted someone who was charming and who would make the audience feel safe. “Who else is that but Channing Tatum?” she says. “The whole world would be like, yes, I would go on vacation with you and feel totally safe. There’s nothing creepy about him.”
In the psychological thriller “Blink Twice,” when tech billionaire Slater King (Tatum) meets cocktail waitress Frida (Ackie) at his fundraising gala, sparks immediately fly. He then invites her to join him and his friends on a dream vacation on his private island. But as strange things start to happen, Frida begins to question her reality. She’ll have to uncover the truth if she wants to make it out of this party alive.
Keeping the party alive
For the characters that surround Frida and Slater – the women in Frida’s position and the guys that are part of Slater’s posse – Kravitz was intent on building an ensemble that the audience wanted to hang out with, keeping the party alive before things get very dark.
“It was important that it felt like one big group,” says the director. In that she looked to bring in a range of personalities. Christian Slater plays Vic, the jerk that the rest of them put up with, while Haley Joel Osment is Tom, who has a sweetness that masks microaggression. Simon Rex is Cody, in Kravitz’s words an “overly Kumbaya dude” who annoys the other guests as he blathers on about what he has made for dinner, while Levon Hawke is the innocent Lucas.
Frida arrives with her best friend Jess, played by Alia Shawkat. “Jess is kind of the whistleblower, if you will,” Shawkat says.
According to Ackie, cultivating a “best friend vibe” with Shawkat was easy. “We found out we had a similar sense of humor,” Ackie says. “We were dancing together, we were drinking together, we were talking about deep s**t, we were talking about art, we were talking about friendship.”
In addition to Frida and Jess, the other women on the island include Adria Arjona as Sarah, a “Survivor” alum with whom other women feel competitive, as well as Liz Caribel Sierra and Trew Mullen as the fun-loving Camila and Heather, respectively. In Heather, Kravitz fulfilled her dream of wanting to create “a female Spicoli, stoner character.” Spicoli is the stoner dude in the 1982 cult classic “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” popularized by Sean Penn.
“They are all kind of based on people that I know and kind of finding the different personalities and fitting them together was like a puzzle,” Kravitz says.
Geena Davis, meanwhile, plays Stacy, one of Slater’s sisters, who symbolizes female complicity in his actions. Considering Davis’s activism around women in film, her presence offers a bit of a meta text for the viewer. “I’ve been such a huge fan of Geena’s forever,” Kravitz says. “She’s one of the people who has been having this conversation way before, so the fact that she read it and got it and wanted to be a part of it, felt really good.”
As for the caliber of the ensemble, producer Bruce Cohen says: “We punched way above our weight in terms of getting this extraordinary ensemble of actors to be in the movie in what on the page could have been smaller parts than they might have been interested in.”
Fellow producer Tiffany Persons agrees, saying that the casting is what “made the magic.”
Don’t miss “Blink Twice,” distributed in the Philippines by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Discovery company, opening only in cinemas August 21. #BlinkTwiceMovie
