Lupita Nyong’o has reflected on losing her Kenyan accent in her pursuit of Hollywood roles, saying the process was so painful she “cried many nights to sleep.”
The Oscar-winning actor , 41, is the daughter of Kenyan politician Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o. She was born in Mexico but raised in Kenya from the age of three.
Speaking on the What Now? with Trevor Noah podcast, Nyong’o recalled her experiences at the Yale School of Drama. “The first permission I gave myself to change my accent or allow my accent to transform was going to drama school,” she said.
“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.”
She went on to explain that learning to lose her East African accent meant grappling with questions around her identity. “I didn’t know how to sound any other way than myself,” she said. “That was the first permission that I gave myself. But it was full of heartbreak and grief, just grief.