Lupita Nyong'o Is Now Embracing Her Kenyan Accent After Previously Trying to Sound American
Lupita Nyong’o looks pretty in blue while attending a screening of her new movie The Wild Robot held at CMX Cinemas Dolphin 19 on Wednesday (September 18) in Miami, Fla.
The 41-year-old actress stars as the main character, robot Roz, after she is shipwrecked on an uninhabited island and must learn to adapt to the harsh surroundings, gradually building relationships with the animals on the island and becoming the adoptive parent of an orphaned gosling.
Watch the trailer here!
Lupita just launched her new podcast, Mind Your Own, and in the first episode, she opened up about embracing her Kenyan accent after all these years of trying to sound American.
Keep reading to find out more…
If you didn’t know, Lupita was born in Mexico where her father was teaching, but moved to Kenya at the age of three.
She recalled years of having “a complicated relationship with the way I speak” and “in order to create this podcast, I had to get very comfortable with my voice.”
While she embraced her African accent in college at Hampshire College, she changed it when she studied acting at Yale School of Drama.
“I made this pact with myself that I would learn how to sound American in a way that would guarantee me a career in acting,” she shared on the podcast, “because obviously I didn’t know very many people in movies and television with Kenyan accents. There was just no market for that.”
All of her voice lessons paid off after a casting director was surprised learning she was from Kenya. “She said, ‘Oh my goodness, you don’t have an accent.’ And I was at once so elated and also so crushed. I had ridden myself of myself, kind of,” Lupita said.
However, before starting the press tour for her movie 12 Years a Slave in 2014, she told her publicists she wanted to embrace her Kenyan accent more.
“I said, ‘I’ve decided that from tomorrow I am going to return to my original accent. I want to send a message that being an African is enough.’ They had never heard me speak in a Kenyan accent,” she shared.
Lupita recalled her mother embraced her decision.
“She said, ‘Your accent is representative of your life experience.’ That gave me solace, that an accent comes to being from your life… and just like skin and hair, it can change and it’s okay,” she said. “I guess this accent is called Lupita! I don’t know who could claim it but me.”
If you missed it, Lupita recently revealed that she will be voting in her first US election this year, and shared her endorsement for Vice President Kamala Harris.