In an interview with CNN, Lupita Nyong’o revealed that she only won an Oscar for her supporting role in “The End of the World,” but that she received offers to play more slave roles in the months following her breakthrough win. Nyong’o made her feature film acting debut as Patsy in the drama film directed by Steve McQueen.
“When I won the Academy Award, it was the very beginning of my career,” Nyong’o said. “That was the first movie I ever did. So it set the pace for everything I did after that. What’s so interesting is that after you win an Academy Award, you start thinking, ‘Oh, I’m going to get starring roles here and there.'” But it’s, ‘Oh, Lupita.’ I want you to make another movie where you’re a slave, but this time you’re on a slave ship. ” Within a few months of winning the Academy Award, such an offer came to me. ”
“It was a very tender moment,” she continued. “I have high hopes for you and your career. I had thoughts about whether this is the beginning or the end of this African woman’s career. I had to listen to all the popes. After all, I’m not a theory. I’m a real person. I don’t know what it means to be African. I want to be a joy warrior for changing the paradigm of what that means. If that means working one less job a year to avoid perpetuating these stereotypes of what people expect, then I’ll take one less job a year. Judging by my content, let me do it. ”
Following her Oscar win for “The Night Goes Away,” Nyong’o made the leap to become a blockbuster when she was in charge of motion capture for the role of Maz Kanata in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” Her road to blockbuster success continued with a role in the Marvel film Black Panther. Her other notable films include “Queen of Katwe,” “Us,” and “A Quiet Place: Day One.”
In a 2024 episode of the podcast “What Now? With Trevor Noah,” Nyong’o said he was indirectly forced to lose his Kenyan accent in order to become an American actor and play various roles in Hollywood. She said she felt “betrayed” by herself when she made that decision.
“The first permission I had to change my accent or change my accent was to go to drama school,” Nyong’o said (via Entertainment Weekly). “I went to drama school because I didn’t want to be just an instinctual actor. I wanted to understand my instrument. I wanted to know what I was good at, what I was bad at, and I wanted to work on the things I wasn’t good at. And what I wasn’t good at was accents.”
“The whole process of deciding, ‘Okay, let’s start practicing my American accent, but I’m not going to let it sound like a Kenyan,’ was like monitoring my own mouth, and really trying to understand my mouth technically so that I could make new sounds. Making new sounds in a non-classroom environment felt like a betrayal,” she added. “You know, I didn’t feel like myself and I cried myself to sleep many nights…over and over again.”
Nyong’o will next star in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
