Lupita Nyong’o 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. But diving into that learning process meant getting rid of the Kenyan accent she grew up with.
“I didn’t know how to sound any other way than myself,” Nyong’o shared on the podcast What Now? with Trevor Noah. “That was the first permission that I gave myself. But it was full of heartbreak and grief. The process of deciding, okay, 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 monitoring and really trying to understand my mouth in a technical way to make these new sounds.”
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 12 Years a Slave (2013). In the years that followed, she alternated between voice roles and on-screen appearances, leading up to another major breakthrough in the culture-shifting Marvel film Black Panther in 2018.
“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.’ 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.”
Nyong’o recalled listening to a voice note that her mother sent her of a speech she had recorded prior to moving to America. “It brought me to tears because I’ve never been able to sound like that, and I never will,” she said. But the actress found solace in family and friends who supported her creative journey. She remembered her mother telling her: “The way you sound is a product of your life experience.” That includes her original Kenyan accent, the one she picked up in America, and the one she formed while living in Mexico and learning Spanish.
“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. I would say it’s great to go into a program and to allow yourself to expand beyond the limitations of your identity.”
