Curry Barker’s $334.4 million grossing film Obsession has become such a huge hit in 2026 that Hollywood studios are now using it as a case study and searching for the next viral hit. At the same time, the film skyrocketed Superman & Lois‘ Inde Navarrette’s career, but not because of what she did with Nikki Freeman, but because of what that performance keeps making people feel long after they’ve left the cinema.
The discourse is relentless, of course. Bear discourse. Nikki discourse. Consent discourse. And somewhere in between all of it, Inde Navarrette is smiling and telling the internet in interviews that her number one animated crush is Optimus Prime, followed closely by Shrek (“he’s super tall and protective, I get it”) and Mufasa. The Complex interview went viral within hours. X’s Culture Crave amplified it. And suddenly the actress playing one of the year’s most unsettling horror icons is also the person you want to grab coffee with. But you’ll probably need a One Wish Willow to make that come true today.
But there’s something more interesting underneath the fun. In a recent interview with The Cut, the 25-year-old sat down for a Rules to Live By conversation that, if you’ve seen Obsession, hits very differently than a standard press junket chat.
Her number one rule for dating is, “Keep in check with yourself to make sure that you’re not losing yourself.”
That’s basically the whole warning the film presents in one sentence. Nikki Freeman spends the entire runtime of Obsession as a woman who cannot keep in check with herself because Bear’s wish on a One Wish Willow stick has put her in a spell and stripped her of that ability entirely.
See, the horror of Obsession isn’t really the jump scares. It’s watching someone lose themselves and being able to do absolutely nothing about it. The real Nikki is trapped inside her own body and mind, watching everything happen.
It sounds like Navarrette knew exactly what she was playing. Off screen, she’s built what sounds like the anti-Nikki life. She loves dating herself, which in practice means ten-minute YouTube painting videos, pottery, solo drives, and video games. “Even though you might be dating somebody else, don’t ever stop dating yourself,” she told The Cut. The woman who spent a film being psychologically hollowed out by someone else’s desire has apparently made her own company the non-negotiable.
She’s also drawn a clean line about Obsession‘s popularity online. “I recognised that this film is no longer mine, it’s everybody else’s,” she said. “Out in the wild, there’s some opinions that aren’t my business. They might be about me, they might be about the film, but they don’t know me, so it’s not my business.”
But Navarrette still enjoys seeing all the TikToks. She loves all the theories about the film. But beyond that, she’s just a character she had to play.
And the one rule she followed on set was refusing to give up her power chasing other people’s approval. “Every time that I felt myself yearning for validation, I removed myself from either the conversation or the scenario, because I knew that as soon as I gave up my power in that way, it was going to be really difficult for me to get it back.”
Nikki, of course, never got to make that choice. And that’s the whole point, right?
Navarrette is also a practical person in ways that are quietly funny. She ghosts people who were rude on a first date without a second thought, but insists grown adults can send a text message if the date went well and they’re just not feeling it.
When The Cut asked what Nikki would have wished for on the One Wish Willow if she’d gotten there first, Navarrette answered without hesitation. “She would have wished for a publishing deal or a literary agent to take her out of the hometown and to really set her on her path with writing.”
That’s the piece everyone keeps missing in the Obsession discourse. The film is being read as a horror story about obsession, which it is, but underneath that, it’s a film about a woman who had a whole life ahead of her and had it taken away from her. Inde Navarrette understood that immediately.
