Do you wanna dance with somebody? Do you wanna feel the heat with somebody? Well, good news: Whitney Houston biopic I Wanna Dance with Somebody is now in cinemas, from December 26.
Starring BAFTA Award winner Naomi Ackie, recently seen in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and the second season of Netflix’s The End of the F***ing World, as the supremely talented and tragically doomed pop star, I Wanna Dance with Somebody has an excellent behind-the-camera pedigree.
Eve’s Bayou and Harriet director Kasi Lemmons calls the shots (she also played Clarice Starling’s FBI Academy roommate in The Silence of the Lambs, trivia fans) working from a script from biography specialist Anthony McCarten, whose words have brought to life Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour, and Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody (well, they can’t all be winners).
In front of the camera, we get everyone’s favourite Italian uncle, Stanley Tucci, as Clive Davis, the music executive who discovered Houston, Moonlight’s Ashton Sanders as her wife-beating POS husband Bobby Brown, Law and Order: SVU’s Tamara Tunie as Houston’s mother, Cissy, and Black Lightning’s Nafessa Williams as Robyn Crawford, Houston’s long-time confidante, assistant and, as Crawford’s recent book confirms, sometime lover.
We also get Houston’s voice, with Ackie confirming that she lip-synched to the late diva’s songs, with Houston’s actual vocals added in post. Speaking to Empire, she noted, “97 percent of it is Whitney singing, and it shouldn’t be any other way.”
Of course, we know that Houston’s life took a turn for the dark, and her final years were marked by violence, drug abuse, and legal issues, so it’ll be interesting to see if Lemmons manages to balance the scintillating success of her early career with the horrifying lows of her later life. Find out from Boxing Day, we guess.
