London Evening Standard
Louise Jury, Chief Arts Correspondent
Updated 15:47pm on 25 Aug 2011
It is being billed as this year's High School Musical and looks set to make a London teenager a star.
Pressure: Naomi Scott plays a girl trying to meet her parents' expectations as well as her own ambitions
Naomi Scott was the only Briton chosen for Lemonade Mouth, a Disney movie about five teenagers whose school band becomes the voice of their generation.
In two airings on American television, it has already reached more than 13.5 million viewers and ranks as the top original movie on US cable television this year, following Disney's previous blockbuster TV films High School Musical and Camp Rock.
But Naomi, 18, has already moved on - to working with Steven Spielberg.
Next week she flies back to Australia where she has spent most of this year shooting Terra Nova, a science fiction dinosaur drama being produced by Spielberg.
She said she was incredibly excited to be working with Spielberg, who was "heavily involved". She said: "Within a few weeks of coming back from filming Lemonade Mouth I got these scripts and Terra Nova was the one that stuck out. I was, like, 'Oh my gosh'."
British viewers will get their first chance to see Lemonade Mouth on the Disney Channel next month.
Naomi is on a fleeting trip home - her parents, Chris and Usha, run a Pentecostal church in Woodford, Essex - to help promote the film.
"I'm really excited to be showing the other guys [in the cast] around London. We're going to different landmarks like the Gherkin, the London Eye and Buckingham Palace. They will eat that all up," she said.
The teenager, who was born in Hounslow, started her career singing with her parents' Bridge Church youth band and in productions at the Davenant Foundation School in Loughton.
She was spotted by pop singer Kelle Bryan, from girl band Eternal, who signed her as a client and she soon made an appearance in Life Bites, a Disney Channel UK series.But she did not expect to get picked for the new movie.
"It was such a big project. When I did get it, my mum and I were jumping around. I didn't play it cool at all."
She plays Mohini Banjaree, the bass guitarist in the Lemonade Mouth band, who grapples with her parents' high expectations to be the perfect Indian teenager.
There seems little chance of her being anything but in real life.
Following the example of her British father and Indian mother, from Uganda, she regularly takes part in mission and outreach work in the community and has travelled several times to Slovakia to teach English in secondary schools.
"I'm really close to my family and we talk through things. My parents are so amazing, they're brilliant. We try to take one step at a time and be wise about the decisions we make and keep our values and the things that are important," she said.
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