Lupita Nyong’o has become a rising star in Hollywood, but to make inroads in the industry, she seemingly had to fix her accent first. This, in return, broke her heart.
Explaining the matter, she said on What Now? with Trevor Noah podcast that her Kenyan way of speaking was a hurdle during her early career because the Oscar winner was born in Mexico but raised in East Africa.
“The first permission I gave myself to change my accent or allow my accent to transform was going to drama school. 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,” the 12 Years a Slave star recalled.
“I didn’t know how to sound any other way than myself,” the 41-year-old continued. “That was the first permission that I gave myself. But it was full of heartbreak and grief, just grief.”
However, the Black Panther actress remembered the process was painful because it gave her the vibe of betrayal.
“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 like monitoring and really trying to understand my mouth in a technical way to like make these new sounds.”
“Making those new sounds in a context that wasn’t the classroom felt like betrayal,” she said. “You know, I didn’t feel like myself and I cried many nights to sleep many, many nights,” Lupita concluded.
