Fashion Women's Fashion

Naomie Harris Is “Fully Inhabiting Womanhood” and Winning in Hollywood

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In just one conversation there’s talk of Jamaica, Atlanta, Detroit, Georgia, Paraguay, L.A. Even the most seasoned and appreciative traveller, such as Harris, could find that peripatetic lifestyle draining. One way she stays level is by bringing a little bit of London with her wherever she goes: Harris’s family and friends travel to each and every location she films in. Earlier this year, while working on her new feature film, Black and Blue (where she plays a rookie cop on the wrong side of both the police force and a criminal circuit—in theatres October 25), 15 of her nearest and dearest traveled all the way to New Orleans to stay in a huge house together.

Having started in the industry as a child actress and being a self-confessed “hard taskmaster” whose intense characters (such as Winnie Mandela in Long Walk to Freedom and drug-addled mother Paula in Moonlight) can take months to fully shake off, it was perhaps no surprise that at some point the super-conscientious Harris would hit a wall. “I was burnt out, really,” she admits, in a candid, matter-of-fact way few celebrities offer. “After award season [2017] and after I’d done the whole Moonlight thing, then I went on to do Rampage with Dwayne Johnson, The Rock, and spent, I think, four months filming in Atlanta. And I just got back and was just like I’m done. I’ve lost my passion for this career I’ve been doing since I was 9 years old, and I’d never done anything else.” And so, “absolutely exhausted,” and upon the recommendation of a rather sensible doctor who didn’t resort to prescribing medication to simply mask the problem, Naomie instead switched up her lifestyle entirely, taking an eight-month break from work and the adrenaline overload, leading to her very own Eat, Pray, Love kind of journey.

Although Harris felt compelled to explore possibilities for a prospective plan B career (and she had already garnered a degree in social and political sciences from Cambridge University in 1998, just in case), it was a monthlong Ayurvedic retreat in India—and the adjoining digital detox—that moved the needle. Candlelight meditation, yoga, massages, being completely and utterly uncontactable… It’s no wonder Harris has already revisited this haven and plans to again. “I didn’t want to be one of those people who just works myself into a grave and then suddenly I’m having panic attacks or, you know, I’ve developed an illness because I wasn’t listening to the signs in my body,” she says. She now follows up this solid groundwork with twice-daily meditation and a “literally life-changing” stream-of-consciousness writing exercise each morning, inspired by the book, The Artist’s Way—something that she urges me to do too, such is her evangelism. “I’m so grateful that I did take that time out because, honestly? I came back and I had such renewed passion for [my career] and such gratitude.”

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