Lupita Nyong'o reflects on losing her Kenyan accent to land American roles in Hollywood, only to be asked to go back to her original accent later on.
Lupita Nyong'o attends the World Premiere of"Renaissance: A Film By Beyoncé" at Samuel Goldwyn Theater on November 25, 2023 in Beverly Hills, California. made a sacrifice early in her career. Wanting to better understand the boundaries of her own talents so that she could push and expand them, she enrolled in drama school. One area of performing that she recognized as particularly underdeveloped was her accent work.
It was an undertaking that she took beyond the classroom to make sure that it stuck. Nyong’o described the process of suppressing her accent to make room for these new ways to contort her voice as feeling like a “betrayal,” adding: “I didn’t feel like myself. I cried many nights to sleep. Many, many nights.” When she would call home to her family, she would speak to them in her sharpened American accent.
“There were moments when I wanted to give up, but I had this goal,” she explained. “I wanted to be able to succeed in an American market as an actor.” Just after she graduated from the Yale School of Drama, Nyong’o scored her breakthrough role in Steve McQueen’s“I did all that work just for someone to tell me, ‘Uh uh, now got and sound like yourself,'” Nyong’o said. “That was another betrayal. I’ve done all this so that I can come out here and people can be like, ‘You don’t have an accent.
“Without my training at Yale, I wouldn’t have been able to play a Ugandan. I wouldn’t be able to do Black Panther and try my hand at Xhosa,” Nyong’o said. “So the training at Yale was not just about sounding American. It was about being able to pick apart accents and hear them … Learning how language and accent worked technically helped me to be able to actually play more Africans.
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