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The concept of Obsession—Curry Barker’s critically applauded full-length debut about a hopeless romantic who breaks the mysterious One Wish Willow to win over his crush, only for things to go disturbingly awry—hinges almost entirely on the performance of its female lead. It’s a role that demands a lot from its actor, requiring someone who could deliver an emotionally grounded yet utterly unhinged physical interpretation of the ugliest parts of a relationship. She needed to be beautiful yet terrifying, sweet yet devilish, intense yet manically exuberant. Inde Navarrette was the woman for the job.
Navarrette, who played a different kind of girlfriend across four seasons of The CW’s Superman & Lois, is spectacular in this twisted rom-com that takes the ideas of toxic masculinity and obsessive desires and turns them on their head. Across its 110 minutes, I couldn’t take my eyes off of the actress (this is coming from someone who often watches horror films peeking through her fingers) and was mostly in awe of how she pulled off such a physical feat of a nightmare-inducing performance. Much in the same way it’s putting its 26-year-old auteurist director and screenwriter on the map, Obsession is sure to make a star of Navarrette, who more than proves she is leading-lady material.
I can’t say enough about your performance in Obsession. It’s truly fantastic. Take me back to when this project came to you.
I had wrapped a TV show called Superman & Lois that I was on for four years, and I really wanted my next job to be something that was miles different—like, not even in the same continent. I was getting auditions and scripts, and for me, nothing had really been super different. I played a girlfriend on Superman & Lois, and I just didn’t want to play the girlfriend anymore. But then I got this kind of girlfriend, and I was like, “Okay, I really like this because it’s [essentially] multiple characters,” and I thought it would be really fun to do. I hadn’t read a script like this before, and I also had never seen this sort of take on anything. I love it when stories are metaphorical and they don’t directly just say things. They get the audience to think. And [it’s] not in a so far, artsy way that the common sense isn’t there. This is in-your-face to a good degree.
I went through a very rigorous audition process, which was great. It needed to be rigorous because of the emotional demands of a role like this. There’s a lot of trust that Curry is putting in somebody to tell the story that he wants to tell. [For] something as demanding as this, “rigorous,” I think, is a very positive term.
Barker is a fresh voice in the horror space. Were you familiar with his YouTube content prior to working with him on this film?
I think the media that I consume is very different from the media that he creates. Mine is very much like Trixie and Katya, drag queens, RuPaul’s Drag Race, that sort of thing. It’s very different from Milk & Serial and That’s a Bad Idea and everything that he’s created. But I really loved going down that rabbit hole ’cause I really wanted to understand who he was. But what I really love about the difference between That’s a Bad Idea, Milk & Serial, a short film that he did called The Chair, and Obsession is they’re all different. They’re all in the same vein, but they’re all different. Obsession is elevated because he got an opportunity with money, and it was his first feature film, and he really sent it with everything that he could.
What do you like about his style of filmmaking?
You know as a parent when you know what’s best for the child and the child doesn’t know but then the child can completely reframe your way of thinking because it’s completely different? That’s kind of our dynamic as director and actor. He sees something like a parent would so far in the future, and I would have to trust him because I sometimes wouldn’t see it. But then there were times where he let us play, and he’d be like, “I didn’t even think of that.” So it was a scale that never really fully tipped because he would add, and we would add, and he would add, and we would add. We got into a really good rhythm.
Did anything about playing Nikki make you nervous going into filming?
Every day, I was like, “What the fuck am I doing?” But I think there’s a freedom in that because when you don’t know what to do, you can do everything. And then if it works, it works. Nikki was one of the first characters that I understood fully, so … no matter how much I didn’t know, I, at least, had that foundation of understanding who she was underneath it all and why she was acting the way that she was acting. It really wasn’t like I was going from ground zero but as Inde. Screaming at the top of my lungs, being covered in foreign materials sometimes in front of people doing very embarrassing things, it was very freeing. At a certain point, you just don’t care. You had to let it go.
Speaking of, we have to talk about the physical nature of your performance. Nikki has these unprovoked freak-outs where her voice and body warp into something inhuman and ultimately unrecognizable. Did you have any specific references for building those moments?
I’m a very visual person, and once Curry and I figured that out, it was really great. Obviously, it’s very demanding, and written on paper, it was just “freak-outs” being the word. But what does that look like? How heightened does it go? When does it come in? How long does it stay, and when does it go away? We played with the timing a lot, especially with switching back and forth between “wish Nikki” and Nikki. That was really fun.
We watched Mia Goth’s performance in Pearl because we really wanted her performance to be utterly grounded and humane but also heightened. I never wanted the audience to suspend disbelief for this idea. I wanted the audience to be so locked in and so emotionally attached to Nikki because Nikki is the ugliest aspects of being in a relationship. Whether that’s a friendship or relationship with yourself or a relationship with your parents or a partner, it’s just really ugly but also really true. That’s what I really wanted to accomplish with Nikki. Having visual representation like Mia Goth’s performance in Pearl… It’s very similar in that aspect of “Okay, I understand why you do it.” We would be on set, and I’d be like, “Okay, is this Pearl level?” It was also really nice because every day I felt like Curry was just like, “Just go.” And I don’t think once he’s been like, “Tone it down.” It was us having a really good string of thought.
How did you hype yourself up for those heightened Nikki scenes versus when you played human Nikki?
That’s a really good question. Curry’s talked about this before, but I wouldn’t show him anything before the camera started rolling. For obvious reasons, that was not the best thing for him because he’s like, “My whole movie is riding on this, and she won’t show it to me.” But for me, I felt like if I expended any amount of energy before those moments, I couldn’t give that moment everything. I don’t know how to explain that other than that, and I hope people understand what I’m saying when I say that. It would be mentally preparing to communicate with my body that this is what we’re doing and then doing it.
I have seen some comparisons to the likes of Weapons, Barbarian, Nope, and Together in terms of this being a horror project with comedic value. Was that an element of this film that excited you as well?
Haley Johnson … was a phenomenal producer on Obsession. I remember turning to her during the premiere at TIFF and just humbly going, “Nobody’s laughing at Nikki’s jokes,” and she goes, “Baby, nobody’s supposed to find Nikki funny.” Also, simultaneously, I didn’t realize that this movie was that funny. Me, Cooper [Tomlinson], Megan [Lawless], and Michael Johnston, we all didn’t realize how funny it was. Things were getting such a die-hard laugh that I didn’t expect, but I think it was because I was so in Nikki I couldn’t find anything funny. Now watching it back, I was like, “Oh!” It’s also really funny to see which demographic laughs at what. Who’s laughing at what jokes, and why? I found that really interesting.
It speaks to the larger conversation and metaphor that’s happening in the film too. How would you decompress after a big filming day, especially during those heightened scenes?
I really love driving, and I really love my car. My car is an oldie but goodie. She turned 21! I would drive her to and from work. It’s a convertible, so the top could go down. We were shooting nights, and I really love early 2000s … dad rock. So a lot of Creed, a lot of Nickelback, a lot of Korn, a lot of Daughtry, 3 Doors Down, a lot of Paramore and that kind of music or just dead silence. So that’s how I would decompress—just having that drive home to really separate myself from work life and then also home life. Whenever you’re shooting a film like that, it really is like Groundhog Day. You want to sleep as much as you possibly can. That way, you’re not tired, but also, it’s 12-, 14-hour days. You shoot from, let’s say, 5 p.m. to 5 a.m., and then you get home, and you immediately go to sleep, and then you sleep for 10 hours. You have two hours to eat food, and then you hop in the car, and you go again. So it’s a lot of the same thing over and over again, which is kind of nice ’cause you get into a rhythm. You never really lose that momentum, but the decompression, for me, was definitely driving. We were filming in winter, and driving a convertible in winter with a nice little hoodie, it’s very cinematic.
When you watched it for the first time, what was your reaction?
Oh my God. I think it’s a very interesting experience to be terrified of yourself, but it was so much fun to be able to watch what we had all done the hard work on. It shocked me ’cause at TIFF was the first time that I had ever seen it, and I didn’t know how loud a movie it was. It’s intense. So that was different. That was terrifying. It’s super embarrassing whenever you’re the actress and you know what’s gonna happen. You shout in the middle of TIFF, and everybody turns and looks at whoever shouted, and it’s me.
When you finished Obsession, did you see yourself again running in a completely different direction for what you wanted to do next?
Oh, that’s a really good question. No, not necessarily. I think Obsession cracked me wide open and proved to myself that I’m capable of doing things that I didn’t think that I would have been able to do. I think [I’m] carrying that on into other ideas and movies that I’ve loved for years but never thought I would be capable of doing. Not that I didn’t think I would be capable of doing [them]—just that I didn’t see myself in them and changing that mindset a bit. Like with action films, I’m really small (I’m 5 foot), so I’m like, “How am I gonna fit into this?” And then it’s like, “Oh, a teeny-tiny assassin, maybe?” I just finished [reading] this series called Fourth Wing where she’s really small, and apparently, they’re making a series. So I don’t want to run so far in the opposite direction ’cause I’ve actually fallen in love with horror. I think I’ll stay in this genre for as long as they will have me. I definitely wanna keep putting my fingers in other pies.
In the spirit of the film title, what is your current obsession?
A couple things. I’m really into sunglasses right now—really big, black, gaudy soccer-mom sunglasses. I’m showing up, and I’m telling the kids what to do. I’m really into skincare right now. There’s these face masks that you sleep with all night, and they turn clear and harden a little bit. I was in Thailand filming a movie this summer, and we stopped off in South Korea, and I got skincare there. I’ve been having a fun little time.
Obsession is in theaters May 15.
