Lupita Nyong’o recently revealed on the ‘What Now? with Trevor Noah’ podcast that she had to drop her Kenyan accent to become an American actor.
“The first permission I gave myself to change my accent or allow my accent to transform was going to drama school,” the actress said (via Entertainment Weekly). “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.”
Born in Mexico, Nyong’o grew up in Kenya and later studied at Yale School of Drama in the U.S. Formal education helped her prepare for her Hollywood career but made her feel like she wasn’t herself anymore.
“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 explained. “You know, I didn’t feel like myself and I cried many nights to sleep…many, many nights.”
Nyong’o’s breakthrough came when she won an Oscar for her role in ‘12 Years a Slave.’ This led to bigger roles in major films like ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ and ‘Black Panther.’ Recently, she appeared in ‘A Quiet Place: Day One’ and lent her voice to ‘The Wild Robot.’
