In a relatively short period of time, Lupita Nyong’o has risen from being an actress only recognized in Kenya to winning an Oscar – the most coveted award in the film industry. So far, this dark-skinned, authentic Kenyan beauty has won a total of 36 awards out of the 57 she has been nominated for. The Oscar, which she was awarded for Best Supporting Actress, propelled her into bona fide Hollywood stardom. She is the sixth black actress, the first African and the first Kenyan to ever win the prize.
She captured the world with not only her riveting on-screen performance as Patsey in 12 Years A Slave, but also with her effortless sense of style and beauty. People magazine named her the ‘World’s Most Beautiful Woman’ for 2014.
Nyong’o is the daughter of Professor Anyang’ Nyong’o, the current senator for Kisumu County and former Minister of Medical Services. Her star continues to shine brighter and brighter and there is no doubt that she is a woman to watch.
Growing up in Kenya, Nyong’o loved acting in school plays and in an interview with New York magazine in February 2014, she talked about one of her first theatrical experiences acting in Oliver Twist. “I was a passer-by. I had five words: ‘Coming down the street, there.’ That was it.” Even though it was a really small role in the scheme of things, Nyong’o didn’t look down on it. She created a back story for her character – deciding to make the character a man and borrowing her brother’s suit and her father’s briefcase for the role. “I don’t know why I decided to be a man – I think it was more interesting,” she said. Clearly, Nyong’o was on the start of her journey to stardom even though she didn’t know it at the time.
Before he discovered her, 12 Years A Slave director Steve McQueen had auditioned over a thousand actresses for the role of Patsey. None of the other girls had that “majestic grace” that playing Patsey demanded. But when he saw Nyong’o’s audition tape, he immediately knew that he had found his Patsey. As he told Vogue: “It was like looking for a piece of glass on a sandy beach and finding a jewel… She has this aura about her.” He called her in for another audition and eventually offered her the part. That is how Nyong’o ended up playing the role of a long-suffering, cotton-picking slave-girl in Antebellum Louisiana, barely before she had graduated from Yale School of Drama, and winning an Academy Award for it.
Her highly acclaimed performance also won Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and William Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew and The Winter’s Tale.
Just a few weeks before graduating from Yale her agent, Didi Rea, received the script for 12 Years A Slave and she thought the role of Patsey was well suited for Nyong’o. Rea had Nyong’o put together an audition tape for the role. A week later she was called to audition for the casting director in Los Angeles and in another week, she was invited to audition for Steve McQueen in Louisiana. On her return to New Haven, she got a call from McQueen telling her that she had got the part. “I remember I’d just gotten a wrap to lay outside in the sun and take in what had happened, and before I got very far I received a call from an anonymous number and it was Steve offering me the role,” she told The Daily Beast.
12 Years A Slave tells the true story of Solomon Northup (played by Chiwitel Ejiofor in the movie), a free-born black man from New York who was tricked and sold into slavery in 1841. He subsequently spent 12 long years as a slave in antebellum Louisiana. Patsey, the character played by Nyong’o, was a female slave who worked alongside Northup on a cotton plantation owned by a sadistic Edwin Epps (played by Michael Fassbender). Nyong’o’s performance of Patsey was spectacular. It didn’t all come easy; she had to research Patsey and try to walk in her shoes as best she could. She even suggested having Patsey filmed making dolls in her free time because, as she told The Telegraph, “she was robbed of her childhood and I wanted to find ways of capturing that sensibility… It was a therapeutic thing for Patsey, a way to stay in the zone, a part of her that couldn’t be enslaved.” McQueen liked the idea and Nyong’o found herself making dolls herself, one almost every day.
That said, Nyong’o admits that playing Patsey was emotionally harrowing and she had to develop rituals for getting in and out of character, which weren’t always successful. “I wasn’t always successful at letting go of Patsey, because you’re always aware that you have to pick back up with her in the morning. It was hard to leave, but I tried. I had moments of sobbing on my own because something was triggered in the back of my head that reminded me of her situation, and the experience of living in her shoes,” she told The Daily Beast.
When she watched the movie later, she was also overcome with emotion. “I was really nervous about seeing myself in 12 Years a Slave,” she told Vogue, “because it had been such a profound experience in all ways. I remember it being one of the most joyful times in my life – and also one of the most sorrowful. I didn’t want my experience to be in vain. But I will say that when I watched it, my heartstrings were pulled so tight for Solomon that I couldn’t go into the ego trip. I cried – I mean, I was inconsolable. I wept for an hour after the movie.”
She was pleasantly surprised when she was nominated and won an Oscar. “I was dazed and confused and I still am,” she told Women’s Wear Daily.
“It doesn’t feel real. I couldn’t believe I was climbing up the very same stairs that Jennifer Lawrence was climbing. It’s still very surreal. It’s changed a lot – more people know who I am, for example, and I’m sure it’s bound to change (other) things.