Lupita Nyong’o Opens Up About Switching Back to Kenyan Accent

Lupita Nyong’o has revealed she is getting comfortable with her original Kenyan accent again after masking it for years while trying to make it in Hollywood.

The Oscar-winning actress opened up about the way she sounds on the first episode of her new podcast, Mind Your Own, where she told her listeners she has “a complicated relationship with the way I speak.” She added, “In order to create this podcast, I had to get very comfortable with my voice.”

Nyong’o was born in Mexico City, Mexico, to Kenyan parents after her family had fled Kenya due to political repression and unrest in 1980. The family returned to Kenya when Nyong’o was less than one year old after her father was appointed a professor at the University of Nairobi.

When she was 16, she returned to Mexico for seven months to learn Spanish before eventually moving to the United States to pursue a career in Hollywood. While she initially embraced her African accent, Nyong’o admitted things changed after joining the Yale School of Drama.

 

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“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 explained, per People. “Because obviously I didn’t know very many people in movies and television with Kenyan accents. There was just no market for that.”

After taking multiple voice lessons to perfect her American accent, Nyong’o was scouted by a casting director who was surprised to find out she was from Kenya. “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,” the A Quiet Place: Day One star recalled.

In 2013, Nyong’o starred in her Academy Award-winning role as Patsey in Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave. It was while promoting the film in 2014 that Nyong’o decided to return to her Kenyan accent.

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She called her publicists 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.”

Nyong’o remembered how her mother supported her decision, saying, “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.”

As for how she refers to her accent now, Nyong’o said, “I guess this accent is called Lupita! I don’t know who could claim it but me.”