WOODFOOD – where Naomi Grace Scott grew up as the soccer-mad daughter of two pentecostalist pastors – being north of Wanstead Flats and East of Walthamstow, is thought of as being beyond London and qualifies as proper Essex.
Naomi met her husband, footballer Jordan Spence, at her parents’ church and they dated for four years before marrying at an unfashionably young age.
Jordan was a right-back for Ipswich Town until the end of last season. Before that he was with West Ham and Leyton Orient, among other clubs. They have a home deeper than ever in Essex now in a village nestled in the lovely countryside outside Colchester, so it’s all local for the youthful couple.
That is, until perhaps this year, and the release of Disney’s blockbusting Aladdin, in which Naomi stars opposite Mena Massoud and alongside Will Smith’s blue genie, as Princess Jasmine.
In the USA the movie grossed $90 million in its opening weekend and in the space of under three months made $1 billion worldwide.
It is a massive hit in film-industry terms, its success confirmed by the people who count (literally, the accountants), and is now perhaps the first in a live-action “Arabian” franchise for Disney studios, as they ponder updating the two money-making VHS animations that followed the Robin Williams cartoon Aladdin back in 1992: The Return of Jafar and King of Thieves.
This is how the world suddenly changes for a young woman who has inadvertently emerged as the fresh face of Disney, as it prepares to enter the digital streaming wars this autumn. “I don’t really think of it like that,” Naomi answered revealingly, when GG2 asked her what it felt like at the time of the Aladdin premiere in May.
But it is true. Suddenly Naomi Scott is a big name, and is growing up into real celebrity, changing from starlet to star, and even graced the cover of British Vogue in April – the official entry stamp on the fame passport.
She even has her own stylist now, Zadrian Smith: “My right-hand man, slash angel, slash everything,” says Naomi, who has a foot in the fashion world and has already been on the runway for Stella McCartney.
Her next Hollywood feature, Charlie’s Angels, where she acts opposite Kristen Stewart, is due to be released in mid-November and will no doubt be the first of many more movies.
(Incidentally, Aladdin screenwriter John August wrote the screenplay of the previous Charlie’s Angels film and now his partner in the long-running Script Notes podcast, Craig Mazin – The Hangover 2, Identity Theft, Chernobyl – has a “written by” on the latest one: Hollywood is a small community and Naomi is now a citizen.)
Meanwhile Usha, Naomi’s mother, is from Gujarat via Uganda (“I’ve got eight aunties who speak a mixture of Gujarati and Swahili”) and her father Chris is English.
“I actually have the best parents,” says Naomi. “My dad’s the type of guy that I could talk to him about an-y-thing. My parents instilled in me a sense of, even though an opportunity might be huge it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s right.”
Chris and Usha have both been ministers in the global Assemblies of God organisation since Naomi was born and she grew up in a faith that has absolutely remained intact. “My faith is the source of all I do,” she says. “God is the creator, so everything creative I do comes from him.”
Naomi took some flak for not being sufficiently Arabic after winning the role of Princess Jasmine, as if actors do not act and must only represent what they are in real life. But she is used to the vagaries of coming from a mixed background after experiencing a period when she was missing out on auditions: “I had a couple of years in my early 20s when I was nearly getting jobs and not getting them,” she recalls.
“I was maybe the exotic choice for some people – I guess because I’m not white. But there were some Hollywood moments where I was too white for one person, and too not-white for another,” she told Vogue.
This was frustrating but also the predictable career-dip following early success as a young Disney actor-singer in such series as Lemonade Mouth back in 2011 when she was still a teenager (not her first job, which was a Nintendo Wii advert).
To the envy of girls worldwide Naomi was eventually cast as Kimberly, the pink one, in the 2017 Power Rangers movie after her performance in a minor role in The Martian with Matt Damon in 2015 had been left on the cutting-room floor.
Power Rangers proved enough of a break, including three months in the gym and four months mostly night-filming in Vancouver (Naomi certainly earned her fee there), to get her back on the scene; and after that it was off to the races, or rather, off to big-time Hollywood.
In a sort of soul/RnB tradition, although one not commonly observed in Essex, Naomi was first “discovered” singing in church by an ex-member of 1990s girl-band Eternal, Kéllé Bryan, who took Naomi under her wing. At that time Kéllé was managing actors but told Naomi “Don’t worry, you’ll act just fine.”
Naomi Spence (as it says on her passport) enjoys acting and the income it brings but her heart remains with her first-love, music: “I think what a lot of people don't know about me is that music is where it all started, she says. “Music is my first love, what inspires me and ultimately what I feel like I'm meant to be doing.”
In fact it was the music that led to the acting, much of which, like Aladdin, involved musical performance. “I was 15 when I started writing,” Naomi recalled recently. “One of my songs on my first EP I wrote when I was 16 on the piano. I’ve been doing it ever since and that’s how I got my start.”
Following the opening of Aladdin and all the accompanying premieres and press junkets, and with Charlie’s Angels in post-production, Naomi rested for about a week and then immediately set off on a UK tour, taking her music on the road for the first time – eight gigs in ten days.
She has, she says, been fortunate to fund her own studio recordings and to release songs independently instead of accepting a “dodgy deal” from a record company, and for now intends to keep things that way. “I’m spending a lot of time on music at the moment,” she says, “because that’s where I want to spend my time and energy.”
If you watch Naomi singing in her haunting video of “Vows”, the heart-warming/heart-wrenching song she wrote about being married (you’ll understand if you are married), you will also understand the expressive power she enjoys from making her own music compared to the cooperative, industrial-sized enterprise of film production.
“In terms of movies vs. music, it´s interesting because when I'm filming a movie, the ultimate responsibility lies with the director or studio,” she said in a recent interview while on her musical tour. “There's something nice about coming in, doing your job and then letting the rest take care of itself. With music of course I am completely independent, it's just us (my team). It's my responsibility, it's definitely more personal and more intense; there's nothing like the feeling of achievement of seeing something you've created from beginning, in its entirety.”
