Naomi Ackie wants to wait until she’s 40 before starting a family because she “can’t even look after a plant” right now.
The 31-year-old actor has insisted she’s not ready to settle down and have children because she doesn’t own her own home yet. She said she struggles to keep her space tidy and can’t even keep her houseplants alive.
“[I’m] not ready to have my own child until I’m probably like 40 … [It’s] actually good to know … that one day you can just look at a baby and think, ‘I want you,'” she told The Hollywood Reporter.
Ackie explained she hopes to get married in the future but she wants to enjoy married life for a few years before having children.
“I know it’s bad the longer you wait, but I feel really intentional about wanting to be married for a few years before that happens. And I don’t own a home. I can’t even look after a f—— plant, mate. And can I keep my house tidy? No. I didn’t even make my bed before I left for L.A.,” she added.
It comes after Ackie admitted her portrayal of Whitney Houston in I Wanna Dance With Somebody forced her to revaluate her work-life balance after she was left exhausted and at “rock bottom” after the shoot.
“That role pushed me to the edge, to the point where I was, like, I have to change something otherwise I will shrink within this job, within this body, within the world,” she said in an interview with The Observer.
“I was away from home, isolated in Boston for like seven months, and hungry; I lost about 30lb to get to the shape of Whitney,” Ackie recalled.
“I lost a lot of myself, and not because of the art of it. It was to do with me feeling under pressure and trying to not be hated by the world. I was a catastrophic thinker, thinking I was never going to work again,” she added.
Ackie earned critical acclaim for her depiction of the “How Will I Know” hitmaker but confessed it led to her rethinking her work-life balance.
“It got me to such a rock bottom that it was a wake-up call. A job cannot mean so much that it steals my life’s joy. I was, like, we’re gonna need to fix some priorities,” she stated.
