Lupita Nyong’o Says Hollywood Tried to Box Her into Slave Roles After Oscar Win — And Why She Said ‘No’

After winning an Oscar for her role in “12 Years A Slave,” Lupita Nyong’o recalls being offered the same “slave” roles.

via: Variety

Lupita Nyong’o revealed in an interview with CNN that winning an Oscar for her supporting performance in “12 Years a Slave” only led to acting offers for more slave roles in the months that followed her breakthrough victory. Nyong’o made her feature film acting debut as Patsy in the Steve McQueen-directed drama film.

“My winning an Academy Award came at the very start of my career,” Nyong’o said. “It was for the first film I had ever done. So, it really did set the paces for everything I’ve done since. What’s very interesting is that after I won the Academy Award, you’d think like, ‘Oh, I’m going to get the lead roles here and there.’ But it’s ‘Oh, Lupita. We’d like you to do another movie where you’re a slave but this time you’re on a slave ship.’ Those are the kinds of offers [I was getting] in the months after winning my Academy Award.”

“It was a very tender time,” she continued. “There is an expectation for you and your career. There were think pieces about is this the beginning or the end of this African woman’s career? I had to deafen myself to all those pontificators because at the end of the day I am not a theory. I am an actual person. I like to be a joyful warrior for changing the paradigms of what it means to be African. If that means I work one less job a year to ensure that I am not perpetuating these stereotypes that are expected of people from my content then let me do that.”

Nyong’o followed her “12 Years a Slave” Oscar win by making the jump to blockbusters with her motion-capture role as Maz Kanata in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” Her blockbuster path continued with a role in Marvel’s “Black Panther.” Her other notable films include “Queen of Katwe,” “Us” and “A Quiet Place: Day One.”

During an 2024 episode of the “What Now? With Trevor Noah” podcast, Nyong’o said she was indirectly forced to lose her Kenyan accent in order to become an American actor and take on different Hollywood roles. She said it “felt like a betrayal” to herself when she made that decision.

“The first permission I gave myself to change my accent or allow my accent to transform was going to drama school,” Nyong’o 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.”

“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 added. “You know, I didn’t feel like myself and I cried many nights to sleep…many, many nights.”

Nyong’o next stars in Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey.”