Naomi Hayes

Naomi Hayes

Naomi Hayes is one of the principal characters of The Expressionists and one of the most analytically gifted members of the main group. She is eighteen years old, with dark brown hair, purple highlights, and blue eyes.

Naomi is highly observant, organized, intelligent, and deliberate. She prefers to understand a situation before committing herself to it, breaking problems down into causes, probabilities, weaknesses, and likely outcomes until she has enough information to act with confidence. She likes structure, likes knowing what is supposed to happen, and is most comfortable when there is a plan she can follow or improve.

This makes her particularly effective alongside Simon. Simon is often the group's information gatherer, quietly noticing details, patterns, and behaviors that other people overlook, while Naomi excels at taking that information and turning it into something actionable. Once she understands the pieces in front of her, she is very good at determining how they should fit together.

When something disrupts that structure, Naomi's first instinct is not panic, but analysis. She wants to know what changed, why it changed, and what that means for what comes next.

Personality

Naomi is intelligent, highly observant, analytical, precise, organized, direct, patient, practical, and quietly competitive. She is extremely attentive to detail and can become uncomfortable when she is forced to operate with too much uncertainty, but she is not cold or emotionally detached.

Her emotions tend to express themselves strategically. Rather than immediately reacting to how she feels, Naomi often tries to understand the feeling first, determine where it came from, and decide what she should do with it. That habit allows her to remain composed in situations where other people may lose control, but it can also create problems when she encounters emotions that refuse to fit neatly into anything she understands.

Around people she trusts, Naomi is capable of being playful, teasing, irritated, affectionate, and surprisingly warm. She forms strong attachments over time, even if she does not always recognize how important someone has become to her until that attachment begins interfering with the way she normally thinks.

Control

Naomi likes structure because structure gives her something she can work with. She tends to form an internal picture of how something should progress and then begins making decisions that move her toward that outcome, whether she is dealing with school, training, relationships, or larger plans for her future.

By the time she enters college, Naomi already has a rough idea of what she believes that period of her life should look like. She knows what she wants to accomplish academically, what kind of progress she expects from herself, and even approaches dating with an unusually practical mentality. Finding a partner initially exists, at least partially, as another part of the life she intends to build.

The difficulty is that people do not behave as predictably as plans.

As Naomi becomes closer to the rest of the group, she is repeatedly confronted with situations where there is no clean answer and no outcome that can simply be reduced to the most efficient available option. The people around her make emotional decisions, take unnecessary risks, refuse logically superior choices, and occasionally do things simply because they care about one another.

Learning how to live with that uncertainty, rather than attempting to eliminate it, becomes one of the central challenges of her character.

Simon Gray

Simon becomes Naomi's primary romantic relationship over the course of the series, although their relationship begins from a distinctly Naomi-like perspective.

At first, she views dating practically. Simon is intelligent, capable, relatively stable, easy to be around, and does not behave in ways she finds exhausting. In very blunt terms, he initially registers to her as a suitable partner.

What catches her attention more deeply, however, is the fact that Simon has no particular need to impress her. He does not compete with her intelligence, become intimidated by it, or constantly attempt to prove that he is capable of keeping up. Because Simon is perfectly comfortable being underestimated, Naomi gradually begins noticing how much more is happening behind his quiet exterior than most people recognize.

Their relationship develops slowly through familiarity, conversation, training, and the increasing amount of time they spend around one another. What begins as something Naomi can explain to herself logically becomes increasingly difficult to reduce to a list of desirable qualities. Eventually, she realizes that she is no longer choosing Simon because he fits the kind of person she thought she should date. She chooses him because she genuinely cares about him.

That realization is considerably harder for Naomi than she expects.

Simon also becomes one of the few people capable of recognizing when Naomi's habit of reducing situations to outcomes and probabilities is becoming unhealthy. He notices when she begins treating herself as another variable in an equation, something that can be sacrificed if doing so produces a better result.

This creates an important parallel between them. Simon struggles with the belief that his value comes from being useful, while Naomi can begin treating her own wellbeing as something negotiable whenever the numbers seem to justify it. Neither of them is particularly willing to let the other continue thinking that way.

The Group

Naomi often serves as one of the group's primary tactical thinkers. Her Expressions give her access to information other characters simply do not have, but her usefulness goes beyond her abilities. She is naturally talented at identifying patterns, recognizing weaknesses, and understanding where a situation is likely to go wrong before everyone else notices the danger.

This makes her extremely valuable during planning, particularly when combined with Simon's ability to gather and interpret information. Simon often notices the pieces; Naomi determines what to do with them.

That does not mean her conclusions are always easy for the rest of the group to accept. Knowing that something is likely to happen does not necessarily mean she knows how to prevent it, and identifying the mathematically safest or most efficient option does not mean her friends will be willing to follow it.

Over time, Naomi has to learn that predicting what someone will do and understanding why they will do it are not the same thing.

Expressions

Naomi possesses a combination of Expressions centered around causality, weaknesses, and exploitation.

Causal Prediction

Naomi can perceive likely causal outcomes based on the circumstances and information available to her. This is not perfect omniscience or unrestricted future sight; instead, she recognizes chains of cause and effect and can anticipate what is likely to happen if a situation continues along its current path.

The more information Naomi has, the more effective this Expression becomes. During combat, it can allow her to anticipate attacks, recognize dangerous sequences before they fully develop, and position herself or her allies accordingly. Outside combat, it gives her an unusual ability to understand how decisions and events may unfold.

However, prediction does not equal control. Naomi can know that something terrible is about to happen while still lacking the time, information, or power necessary to stop it.

Fault Sight

Naomi can perceive existing weaknesses and faults within people, objects, structures, and systems. Depending on what she is observing, these faults may be physical, structural, or otherwise exploitable, allowing her to identify vulnerabilities that would normally be extremely difficult to recognize.

Fault Amplification

Once Naomi identifies an existing fault, she can make that weakness significantly worse. A tiny structural defect can become a serious fracture, while a minor vulnerability can develop into something much more dangerous.

Combined with Fault Sight, this allows Naomi to be extremely dangerous without relying on overwhelming force. Her strength comes from understanding exactly where something is vulnerable and acting with enough precision to exploit it.

Combat

Naomi's fighting style reflects the way she approaches nearly everything else. She does not usually attempt to overpower an opponent directly; instead, she studies them, determines what they are likely to do, identifies the weaknesses in their approach, and acts when she knows where her effort will matter most.

Causal Prediction allows her to anticipate an opponent's behavior, while Fault Sight and Fault Amplification give her the tools necessary to punish vulnerabilities once she recognizes them. Given enough information and time to study a situation, Naomi can become exceptionally dangerous.

Her abilities also create one of her greatest psychological problems. Naomi frequently sees bad outcomes before everyone else does, including situations where there simply is no perfect solution. Sometimes someone is going to be hurt regardless of what she chooses, and because she naturally thinks in terms of outcomes, she can begin treating herself as the most acceptable person to pay that cost.

As her relationships with the rest of the group deepen, that willingness to sacrifice herself becomes increasingly difficult for the people around her to tolerate.

Performance Direction

Naomi should be performed with control and precision, but never as robotic or emotionless. She usually knows what she wants to say before she begins speaking, so her dialogue tends to feel purposeful and deliberate, particularly when she is discussing something serious or explaining a plan.

She is comfortable with silence, but unlike Simon, Naomi is more willing to take control of a conversation when she believes something needs to be addressed. Her confidence should feel natural rather than arrogant, and the actor should be capable of communicating that Naomi is often processing several possibilities at once even when very little of that thought process is visible on the surface.

Her emotional scenes are particularly important because Naomi's instinct is usually to rationalize what she is feeling before allowing herself to simply experience it. As she grows closer to Simon and the rest of the group, that controlled exterior becomes progressively easier to break, making moments of fear, affection, jealousy, anger, grief, or genuine uncertainty much more significant.

Voice

There is no strict accent requirement. We are looking for a natural young-adult female voice capable of convincingly portraying someone around eighteen years old, with a medium register preferred, although performance is considerably more important than exact pitch.

Naomi should sound intelligent and composed without becoming mechanical, confident without becoming arrogant, and direct without sounding unnecessarily harsh. During stressful situations, her voice should retain a sense of control, while around close friends she should become noticeably warmer, more relaxed, and occasionally playful.

The actor should also be capable of allowing that control to break when necessary. Naomi's strongest emotional moments may involve fear, anger, affection, or genuine panic when she encounters an outcome she cannot solve, and those moments should feel especially powerful because they contrast so strongly with her normal composure.

Her intelligence should come through naturally in what she notices, how she processes information, and how confidently she communicates her conclusions rather than through an exaggerated "genius" performance.

What We Are Looking For

We are looking for an actor who can portray a highly controlled character without flattening the performance. Subtle changes in pacing, hesitation, breathing, and tone should be capable of showing when Naomi is uncertain, uncomfortable, annoyed, interested, frightened, affectionate, or emotionally affected even when she is attempting to remain composed.

As the story progresses, the role will require increasingly strong emotional material. Naomi's abilities frequently place her in situations where she knows something bad is coming before everyone else does, and some of her most important moments come from discovering that knowing an outcome does not necessarily mean she can prevent it.

Her relationship with Simon will also require a gradual transition from practical interest to genuine comfort and, eventually, deep emotional attachment. The ideal performance should make that progression feel natural enough that the audience can recognize it developing before Naomi fully understands it herself.

Compensation

Naomi Hayes is one of the seven principal cast roles and is allocated 1% of total distributable project revenue under the project's contractual revenue-share system.

This is an individual percentage and is not divided with the other principal cast members.

Full royalty, accounting, payment, and contract terms are available in the project's Payment & Contract Details section.

All selected contributors will be required to sign a written agreement before beginning official production work.