Lupita Nyong’o. Lia Toby/Getty Images for BFI
Lupita Nyong’o described the pain she went through losing her Kenyan accent early in her acting career.
“The first permission I gave myself to change my accent or allow my accent to transform was going to drama school,” Nyong’o, 41, shared on a recent 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 said. “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 was born in Mexico City, Mexico, but spent her childhood in Nairobi, Kenya, where she began her professional acting career on the stage at age 14. She went on to enroll in the master’s acting program at the Yale School of Drama, from which she graduated in 2012.
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“I didn’t know how to sound any other way than myself,” she said of the program. “That was the first permission that I gave myself. But it was full of heartbreak and grief, just grief.”
Shortly after graduating from Yale, Nyong’o landed her breakout role as Patsey in 2013’s 12 Years a Slave, a role that ultimately won the actress her first Oscar. While speaking to Noah, 40, she described the process of suppressing her Kenyan accent, noting that taking the skill outside of the classroom and on to a movie set felt like a “betrayal” for her.
Lupita Nyong’o. Jeff Spicer/Getty Images for Paramount Pictures
“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 explained.
“You know, I didn’t feel like myself and I cried many nights to sleep many, many nights,” she continued. Nyong’o added that there were times she “wanted to give up,” but she had set a “goal” for herself and was determined to “succeed in an American market as an actor.”
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“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.”
After her breakout role in 12 Years a Slave, Nyong’o joined franchises such as Star Wars, Marvel’s Black Panther and A Quiet Place, and is currently voicing the titular character in the animated Wild Robot, which is currently in theaters and available on streaming.
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