Naomi Watts has entered her “villain era”.
Naomi Watts has entered a new chapter
The 57-year-old actress plays Hermine Ryan, a housewife hiding her past as a Nazi concentration camp guard, in The Housewife, the new Ben Shirinian-directed drama film, and Naomi has admitted to relishing the unfamiliar role.
The Hollywood star told People: “You’re always looking for complex characters as an actor and certainly she was that in spades.
“I think I also was really struck by this story, how I hadn’t ever heard of it before and how someone could move about their lives in the same way as everyone else and with this past that she was pretending that wasn’t a real thing … and yet it just cracks open as we see the course of the story play out.”
Naomi feels she’s now entering a new era in her career.
The actress explained: “I’ve never played anything like this.
“I guess I’m in my villain era, truth be told, but this was an extreme kind and I was very afraid, but I guess I knew what I was stepping into.”
Naomi explained that she needed to “compartmentalise” her on-screen character.
She said: “You just go to work and you do what is needed to be done in order to make the story work and bring to it as much authenticity as possible.
“It’s ugly and horrific and haunting and you don’t necessarily get away free for the day even when you’ve left the set. It still lives on in your mind thinking about the next day or what you’ve done that day.
“But you know that it’s got a beginning, middle and end, and you’re honouring the story because it’s one of those stories that kind of needs to be remembered.”
Last year, Naomi explained that she’s worked “very, very hard” for her success.
The actress received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2025, and Naomi loves that her career is still flourishing at this stage of her life.
She told Extra: “It’s one that we all feared as we especially in Hollywood as we grew older. We always thought, oh you know, it’s finishing. It’s all done by a certain age. It seems to be not true.”
