Plenty of movie casts spend months together on set and come out the other side talking about the little family they built, sometimes with matching tattoos to prove it. Inde Navarrette had a different approach when she showed up to make the 2026 movie calendar breakout hit, Obsession. She wasn’t, in her words, “trying to be a dick,” but she also wasn’t particularly interested in making friends.
The role asks Navarrette to make some pretty wild emotional turns, and she recently revealed that she took an unusual approach to protecting the headspace she needed to pull them off. During a Focus Features screening of Obsession at the Fine Arts Theatre in Beverly Hills, Navarrette explained (via The Hollywood Reporter) that she went into production intentionally keeping her relationships on set professional. She told the audience:
[Something] that I’ve never done on a set before was, I went on Obsession and I was like, ‘I don’t want to make any friends.’ And it’s not of, ‘I’m trying to be a dick,’ or ‘I’m trying to be an asshole.’ It was just, ‘I really want to focus on the work, and I really want to do this justice. I feel like this is my first opportunity to show range, and I fear that if I make really close friendships with people, that I will be scared to hurt their feelings if I need to go off outside and get myself together for this scene.’
It’s an interesting bit of actor logic, and I get where she’s coming from. Navarrette wasn’t suggesting she walked around the Obsession set terrorizing the craft services table or refusing to acknowledge anybody who said hello. She was trying to create enough emotional distance to prioritize the performance without worrying about how someone might interpret her behavior between takes.
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If she needed five minutes alone before a difficult scene, she wanted to take them. If she needed to disappear outside and get herself into Nikki’s head, she didn’t want to spend that time wondering whether she’d just offended somebody she’d been laughing with 20 minutes earlier.
That was especially important, because the breakout actress saw Obsession as an opportunity to prove what she could do as a performer. When you’re looking at a part as your chance to show some range, I can understand wanting as few distractions as possible. Fortunately, director Curry Barker seems to have understood exactly what she needed. Navarrette continued:
I found on this set, Curry and I having a really good relationship of, when I needed five minutes to go get myself together, if I needed to come to him, it was super professional. Now, we’ve grown to be friends. But at first, it was like, ‘How can we do this movie justice?’
In a funny turn of events, the Superman & Lois veteran’s “I’m not here to make friends” experiment ended with her making a friend anyway. More importantly, she seems to have found the working environment she was looking for. There was enough trust between actor and director for her to ask for space when she needed it without turning every quiet five-minute reset into some kind of interpersonal drama.
Considering how far Nikki travels over the course of the newer horror movie release, that room to disappear into the character probably came in handy.
One has to wonder whether Navarrette will carry this approach into her upcoming role as Rouge. How appropriate is it for the mutant who cannot physically touch her fellow X-crew, or anyone, for fear she’ll steal their powers or their lives, to be played by an actress who goes into the process with all her castmates at arm’s length? We’ll have to wait for the forthcoming Marvel flick to hit theaters to see how she approaches the part.
Until then, fans can revisit 2026’s horror movie blockbuster Obsession, which streams for everyone with a Peacock subscription.