The awards conversation around Obsession has followed Inde Navarrette for months now, and she is determined to meet it the same way she made the movie, by concentrating on the work itself. In an interview with The Playlist published Tuesday, the actress says she has watched the Oscars every single year and even has favorite acceptance speeches memorized, which makes hearing her own name in that conversation feel surreal.
“I don’t want to set my expectations too high,” she says. “And if it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. But if it does, then just screaming.” It is the same grounded outlook she shared in September, when she summed up her approach as “I don’t wish, I work.”
The company she is keeping still astonishes her. Navarrette recalls hearing that Steven Spielberg and Christopher Nolan had praised the film in the strongest possible terms: “That movie works like a motherf**ker.” She had just fought for an IMAX ticket to see Nolan’s The Odyssey, going in disguise to do it, and says recognition from filmmakers of that stature has landed in stages. “I’ll hear something and I go, ‘Oh my God, there’s no way,'” she says.
Playing Nikki, the friend and co-worker trapped by Bear’s supernatural wish, took methodical work. Navarrette says she approached the character like a case study, determined that Nikki keep her personhood even though the story unfolds from Bear’s perspective. “I kind of felt like a professor in psychology because I had to break her down,” she says. “My reference was psychology books, if you will.”
She is choosing her next moves just as carefully. Navarrette is producing Waffle House Index with Apple and Plan B, written by Andrew Nunnelly and directed by Louis Paxton, and she talks about it in the same breath as Rogue, the role she will play in Marvel’s X-Men reboot, as the kind of complicated character she wants to tackle. “If I love the project and I believe in it, I’m going to do it,” she says.
Obsession arrives on Netflix on November 17, which should put Nikki in front of a whole new wave of viewers while the awards conversation plays out, with Oscar nominations expected in January.
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