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Inde Navarrette, best known for her role as Nikki Freeman in Obsession, says she took a deep dive into anime to better understand screenwriting and storytelling while waiting for her star to rise.
Navarrette’s breakout role as Nikki in Obsession didn’t skyrocket her to stardom overnight. In fact, there was a time between the film’s completion and its eventual release when she wasn’t sure what was next for her career.
During that period, she began to stream games on Twitch to make ends meet, and even started studying storytelling in film and TV by watching some of her favorite anime series — specifically, Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen.
“I transitioned into studying film and watching movies and asking, ‘Why do I like them?’” she said in an October 14 interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “What I like is anime, so like, why do I like that? I mean, Jujutsu Kaisen I find to be a very fascinating anime, but why is it so different than Demon Slayer? Why is it so different than other ones? With Jujutsu Kaisen, they play with timelines, right? With Demon Slayer, they don’t, it’s very linear. And what does that mean and how does that affect with storytelling?
“I really dove into, ‘Why is Jujutsu Kaisen so good?’ And I learned about timeline and about storytelling — how a person can have a monologue at the beginning of the episode that matters two episodes later or even at the end, and that person’s dead and you don’t learn it until then — and then attaching that to my screenwriting and trying to learn that way.”
Navarrette is a self-proclaimed nerd; on top of loving anime, she’s also a huge gamer, as evidenced by her (now scrubbed clean) Twitch channel. She was elated when a fan gave her a sealed 2009 copy of Modern Warfare 2 still in its display case back in July at a fan convention, too.
She’s even branching into voice acting, saying one of her dream projects is to voice a character in a Resident Evil game. “I wanna try something smaller to kind of test the waters, and then later, [do something] different, because video games are obviously a big interest of mine,” she said in an August interview. “I love that world, specifically — the Resident Evil world.”
For now, Navarrette is gearing up to play Rogue in Marvel Studios’ X-Men reboot, which she’s assured fans that she’s doing everything in her power to pull off successfully.
“I’m doing everything humanly possible because I love that character,” Navarrette said. “I’ve studied that character. I want to do it justice for myself, for [director Jake Schrieier], for what they want to portray and also for what I as a fan want her to be like. I’m doing everything, exclamation point.”
Given that she’s making a point to start voice acting, it opens up the possibility that maybe someday we’ll hear her in an English dub someday… maybe in a future season of Jujutsu Kaisen?
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