She currently starring as Roz in the brilliant The Wild Robot, starred in this years A Quiet Place: Day One, won the Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her role in 12 Years a Slave and of course is the heart and soul of Maz Kanata in the Sequel trilogy, but part of Lupita Nyong’o‘s journey to her incredible success included some deep sadness as she set aside her natural Kenyan accent to develop a more ‘media friendly’ American accent. Speaking on the “What Now? With Trevor Noah” podcast she described her reasons for changing her accent, and why it was such a difficult 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.”