Lupita Nyong’o enjoyed near immediate success after her first movie, but what followed was at times challenging.
In an interview with CNN’s Inside Africa published on Saturday, November 22, Nyong’o, 42, revealed that though she won an Oscar for her breakthrough performance as Patsey in the 2014 film 12 Years a Slave, she didn’t receive the kind of follow-up film offers that she expected.
“But you know what’s interesting is that, after I won that Academy Award, you’d think, ‘Oh, I’m gonna get lead roles here and there.’ [Instead, it was], ‘Oh, Lupita, we’d like you to play another movie where you’re a slave, but this time you’re on a slave ship,’” she recalled. “Those are the kind of offers I was getting in the months after winning my Academy Award.”
That time in her career was “very tender,” she added, and “There were think pieces about: ‘Is this the beginning and end of this dark-skinned, Black, African woman’s career?’ I had to deafen myself to all those pontificators because, at the end of the day, I’m not a theory; I’m an actual person.”
For Nyong’o, the movies she makes are also part of a larger effort to change stereotypes that persist. After 12 Years a Slave, she won parts in both the Star Wars and Marvel franchises.
“I like to be a joyful warrior for changing the paradigms of what it means to be African,” she explained. “And if that means that I work one job less a year to ensure that I’m not perpetuating the stereotypes that are expected for people from my continent, then let me do that!”
Nyong’o has previously opened up about the experience of losing her Kenyan accent — and the “betrayal” of then being told that movie executives wanted her to sound like herself.
“The first permission I gave myself to change my accent or allow my accent to transform was going to drama school,” she shared on an October 2024 episode of the “What Now? With Trevor Noah” podcast.
“I went to drama school because I didn’t want to just be an instinctive actor,” she continued. “I wanted to understand my instrument. I wanted to know what I was good at, what I was not good at, and work on the things that I wasn’t good at. And one of the things I wasn’t good at was accents.”
Nyong’o, who was born in Mexico City, Mexico, grew up in Nairobi, Kenya. She later enrolled at the Yale School of Drama. “I didn’t know how to sound any other way than myself,” she explained of her time at the school. “That was the first permission that I gave myself. But it was full of heartbreak and grief, just grief.”
Prior to taking on the role of Patsey, Nyong’o worked hard at adopting an American accent. “The process of deciding, OK, I’m going to start working on my American accent and I’m not going to allow myself to sound Kenyan, so that I’m monitoring and really trying to understand my mouth in a technical way to make these new sounds. Making those new sounds in a context that wasn’t the classroom felt like betrayal,” she said.
“I did all that work just for someone to tell me, ‘Uh uh, now go and sound like yourself,’” she said. “That was another betrayal. I’ve done all this so that I can come out here and people can be like, ‘You don’t have an accent.’ And then, now someone is telling me, ‘Actually, we need you just as you were.’ So I had to do it again. And when I tried to return to my accent, I couldn’t find it in my mouth. I couldn’t find that original part of me.”
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