Playing pool at a bar on a Wednesday night this summer, Inde Navarrette heard a stranger behind her use a name almost nobody calls her: “Danielle, how are you?” Danielle is her full first name, and hearing it stopped her in her tracks. “How do I know you? I feel like I’m getting in trouble,” she thought, before the woman asked for a photo. “You sneaky little… You got me with the government [name],” Navarrette told her. “Honestly, girl, you kind of deserve that. This is not going to work with anybody else. You were the first and only one, but yes, you can definitely take a photo.” She calls it the funniest fan encounter she has had.
Recognition is still new for Navarrette, 25, whose breakout turn as Nikki in Obsession turned a $750,000 horror film into a $523 million worldwide hit and now has Focus Features campaigning her for Best Actress. She shared the stories in a new interview with PEOPLE, published Saturday, the same day she takes on the biggest stage of her year.
For all that has changed, her days have not. “We go to the beach. We sometimes go play pool,” she said. “That’s what we did all summer was we went to the same dive bar. We played pool, we went home, we went to the beach, we did the same thing over and over again.” Her longtime friends, she added, are helping keep it that way: “It’s really nice with friends that are saying, ‘You did a good job, but also we’re not changing our schedules.’”
The people she once admired from afar are now offering advice, and it sounds a lot like home. “A lot of what I’m hearing is take time for yourself and have fun where you can,” she said. “Be truthful to the way that you feel and don’t shy away from being yourself.” Hearing that inside the industry, she said, has “made me feel more at home.”
Tonight, Navarrette hosts Saturday Night Live’s Halloween episode, airing at 10:30 p.m. CT on NBC and streaming on Peacock, with Gracie Abrams as musical guest. It is her first time hosting, and she is not short on material. “I have so many ideas that they’re either going to give me a job or kick me out,” she said.
Next up, she plays Rogue in Marvel’s upcoming X-Men reboot, a character she grew up loving in the 2000s films. “I thought Rogue was the coolest, most complicated person ever,” she said. “I lost my mind. I lost my marbles.” When the call came through that she had booked the part, she was in a car with her boyfriend and her makeup artist, trying to silently share the news while still on the phone. He got so flustered that he poured a whole Diet Coke into her bag by accident. “That bag is so sticky and it smells like Diet Coke, but I kind of don’t want to wash it because it’s kind of like that day,” she said. “But yeah, it was pouring a Diet Coke in a purse kind of day.”
To unwind, she has gone back to the movies she loved as a kid, rewatching Twilight nonstop and revisiting Burlesque, which she put on while getting ready for the Academy Museum Gala. She has taken off her eyebrows, too. “Sometimes you rekindle with yourself, you kind of do things that you loved when you were 7,” she said. “I’m trying different things to have fun and just also bring my feet back down to the ground.”