‘Naomi’: Kaci Walfall and Mary-Charles Jones on their character’s friendship

DC’s highly anticipated show “Naomi,” premieres on Tuesday, January 11 at 9 p.m. on The CW.

Developed for television by Ava DuVernay (“Queen Sugar,” “When They See Us”) and Jill Blankenship of (“Arrow”) fame, “Naomi” follows a teen who loves comics and runs the 3rd largest Superman website who, after witnessing an event with “Superman,” discovers that she may have superpowers of her own.

The cast and producers talked with reporters as part of a CW press conference as part of the Television Critics Association winter 2022 virtual press tour.

Set in a high school with military children and the locals known as “townies,” Naomi’s character is discovering herself and like any teenager would but she’s navigating her newfound powers with the help of her best friend, Annabelle, played by Mary-Charles.

“The show’s so grounded in reality in, in a sense through the circumstances, it’s still grounded through reality. So I do genuinely ask myself, what would I do if I found out I had powers,” said Wallfall. “Would I be, maybe not joyful. And I think that I bring that into the character because, as the show goes on, you see that maybe you finding you’re a superhero is not something that you’re completely enthusiastic for. Maybe it makes you different. Um, and you already feel different. So I think that, you know, I, metaphorically, I don’t know if I necessarily have anything crazy like that, but I think I just genuinely ask myself because I see similarities between myself and Naomi and differences of course, but I ask myself, what would I do? And how would I feel?”

For Jones, who plays bestie Annabelle, developing the Naomi/Annabelle friendship was easy based on her and Kaci’s real-life friendship.

“I would say the main thing for Kaci and I was, before we had done the table read, I think we had rehearsed one scene over Zoom for the pilot,” said Jones. “I was like, I think I DM’d Kaci on Instagram cause I didn’t have her number at this point. I was like, “Hey, would you wanna get on a Zoom so that when we pretend to be best friends for the next three weeks, we actually know more than just first names?” So I think that was one of the first things that we did. And then after that we did a whole group Zoom with Daniel [Puig], (“Nathan”) and Camila [Moreno],(“Lourdes”) and Will Meyers and Aidan [Gemme], (“Jacob”) and did very teenagery icebreakers. I think we asked what our star signs were and like what your favorite ice cream flavor was, which is very much something that they would do in like your English class on the first day of school. So I think we nailed the high school friendship with that.”

“Naomi” premieres 9 p.m. Tuesday, January 11, on The CW.