You know Lupita Nyong’o.
The Oscar-winning actor has starred in tons of acclaimed movies, but she began acting professionally at age 14 in Kenya, which is where she grew up.*
*Lupita was born in Mexico but moved to Kenya when she was 3. She eventually returned to Mexico to learn Spanish and then to the US to complete the master’s acting program at the Yale School of Drama.
Last month, Lupita recalled training herself to mask her accent in order to “guarantee” herself a career in Hollywood.
“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 said on her Mind Your Own podcast. “Because obviously, I didn't know very many people in movies and television with Kenyan accents. There was just no market for that.”
Now, Lupita has opened up further about the process of allowing her accent to “change” during a recent episode of the What Now? with Trevor Noah podcast.
“The first permission I gave myself to change my accent or allow my accent to transform was going to drama school,” she shared, noting that she “wasn’t good” at doing accents before she enrolled at the school.
“I didn’t know how to sound any other way than myself. That was the first permission that I gave myself. But it was full of heartbreak and grief, just grief,” she said, explaining that suppressing her Kenyan accent felt like a “betrayal.”
“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 I’m monitoring and really trying to understand my mouth in a technical way to make these new sounds. Making those new sounds in a context that wasn’t the classroom felt like betrayal,” she shared.
“You know, I didn’t feel like myself, and I cried many nights to sleep many, many nights,” she said.
Lupita went on to reveal that she “wanted to give up” multiple times but ultimately pushed through because she was keen to “succeed in an American market as an actor.”
However, after all her work, Lupita was told not to use her American accent as she embarked on her professional career.
“I did all that work just for someone to tell me, ‘Uh uh, now go and sound like yourself,’” she 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.’ And then, now, someone is telling me, ‘Actually, we need you just as you were.’ So I had to do it again. And when I tried to return to my accent, I couldn’t find it in my mouth. I couldn’t find that original part of me.”