Inde Navarrette had a booth waiting for her on Monday night. Focus Features brought the Obsession team back together on October 19 at Little Toni’s Restaurant in North Hollywood for a special reception celebrating the horror hit, and the table at the center of it carried a small plaque made out to her character: “Nikki’s Booth.”
The choice of restaurant carries its own meaning. Barker told the Motion Picture Association that Little Toni’s is where he filmed Bear and Nikki’s dinner date, the scene where Nikki’s “No, no, no” spiral ends with “I thought we were having a nice date!” and became the film’s viral meme. Fans have been making pilgrimages to the restaurant’s booths ever since, so the plaque waiting on the table Monday night was a homecoming as much as an honor.
Navarrette, who plays Nikki in the film, posed in the booth with writer and director Curry Barker and co-stars Cooper Tomlinson and Michael Johnston, who plays Bear, the hopeless romantic whose wish on the One Wish Willow sets the story in motion. A standee of the film’s poster stood on the marble table beside the plaque, which is signed off with a heart and an “xoxo.”
The reception is the latest stop in a run of Obsession celebrations for Navarrette. Over the weekend she was honored at the Newport Beach Film Festival as one of Variety’s 10 Actors to Watch, and on Sunday night she finally met the Nikki performer at Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios Hollywood, closing out a story that began with an open invitation from creative director John Murdy in September.
The home stretch of the year is already mapped out for the film. As TDN reported, Obsession starts streaming on Netflix on November 17, giving everyone who missed Nikki in theaters a booth of their own.