Early in her career, Lupita Nyong’o just wanted to blend into Hollywood, but she soon realized standing out was a hidden gift.
For the first episode of her new podcast Mind Your Own, Lupita opened up about her intimate journey to fully accepting her identity and battling the “complicated relationship with the way I speak” for years.
The Oscar winner was born in Mexico City, Mexico to Kenyan parents, but was raised in Kenya from the age of three. She identifies as a Kenyan-Mexican and can speak Spanish fluently. Despite currently living in the United States for two decades now, Lupita revealed on her podcast that “in order to create this podcast, I had to get very comfortable with my voice.”
Although she embraced her East African accent while enrolled at Massachusetts’ Hampshire College, Lupita recalled the shift happening when she joined the Yale School of Drama to pursue acting.
“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,” the Wild Robot star said. “Because obviously, I didn’t know very many people in movies and television with Kenyan accents. There was just no market for that.”
To ensure she mastered talking like an American, Lupita dedicated several days out of her week to voice lessons. But a compliment from a casting director about her accent only left her feeling bittersweet: “She said, ‘Oh my goodness, you don’t have an accent.’ And I was at once so elated and also so crushed. I had ridden myself of myself, kind of.”
So, in 2014, before starting the press tour for 12 Years a Slave (the feature film she booked right after graduating from Yale and eventually won an Oscar for), Lupita decided to make a change. She called her publicist and said, “I’ve decided that from tomorrow, I am going to return to my original accent. I want to send a message that being an African is enough. They had never heard me speak in a Kenyan accent.”
Lupita’s mother supported her decision, which gave the actor comfort. “She said, ‘Your accent is representative of your life experience.’ That gave me solace, that an accent comes to being from your life… and just like skin and hair, it can change and it’s okay.”
Lupita’s voice has become one that fans know and love. Now, she’s looking to shine a light on other beautiful voices from Africa with her podcast.
“I created MIND YOUR OWN because I was homesick and I wanted to hear stories from other Africans navigating more than one world that they consider home like me,” Lupita wrote on Instagram. “It’s also for anybody who has ever felt alien in one way or another; for everyone considering what it really means to belong.”
“This show is about the personal, intimate, individual and quirky stories that give light to who we are as Africans today!”
You can listen to Lupita’s inaugural Mind Your Own episode below:
