Lupita Nyong’o has spoken about losing her Kenyan accent in pursuit of Hollywood roles, saying the process was so painful and she “cried many nights to sleep.”
The Oscar-winning actor, 41, is the daughter of Kenyan politician Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o. She was born in Mexico but raised in Kenya from the age of three.
Speaking on the What Now? with Trevor Noah podcast, Nyong’o recalled her experiences at the Yale School of Drama. “The first permission I gave myself to change my accent or allow my accent to transform was going to drama school,” she said.
“I went to drama school because I didn’t want to just be an instinctive actor. 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.”
She went on to explain that learning to lose her East African accent meant grappling with questions around her identity. “I didn’t know how to sound any other way than myself,” she said. “That was the first permission that I gave myself. But it was full of heartbreak and grief, just grief.
“The process of deciding, ‘Okay, 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, like, 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. You know, I didn’t feel like myself and I cried many nights to sleep. Many, many nights.”
Nyong’o won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in 2013’s 12 Years a Slave. She has since built one of the most successful careers in Hollywood with high-profile roles in Marvel’s Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. She also landed a voice role in the Star Wars franchise, and starred in Jordan Peele’s Us and Michael Sarnoski’s A Quiet Place: Day One.
Lupita can currently be heard voicing the title character in The Wild Robot, in cinemas now.
