After major roles in horror hit Smile 2 and the live-action Aladdin, the actor is returning to her first love: music. She talks faith, fame and why singing is more freeing than cinema

When Naomi Scott was 27 she had what she refers to now as a “quarter-life crisis”. She had been working as an actor since she was a teenager, swapping bit parts in adverts for plum roles in high-profile Disney TV shows and big-budget Hollywood blockbusters including Aladdin (she played Princess Jasmine) and Elizabeth Banks’s Charlie’s Angels remake. She had also married young, after meeting her husband, ex-professional footballer Jordan Spence, at her local church in east London. Worried that the path she’d taken had its destination already mapped out, she felt frustrated, as if she hadn’t really “mourned the other versions of my life”, as the now 32-year-old puts it. Part of that process, it turned out, was returning to her first love: music.

“I felt I had to go back to basics, to a childlike writing process,” she explains, sipping a black coffee in a vast, sparsely decorated cafe in Hackney, east London, her faded red hair contrasting with the beige backdrop. “Just me on the piano at 14, allowing whatever comes naturally to come. So that’s what I did.” Music had always been in her orbit, be it via singing in a church choir or later working with the bonkers pop production house Xenomania. Somewhere along the way, however, acting had taken over.