Photographed by Mikael Jansson, Vogue, July 2014
In little more than a year, Lupita Nyong’o has made the leap
from serious student to Oscar-winning actress and head-turning fashion
star. Hamish Bowles catches up with Hollywood’s newest golden girl.
Marrakech in May is unseasonably tagine-hot. Hapless tourists are
being felled by sunstroke merely from sauntering across the city’s
pulsing medina square, which is all but abandoned by the native food and
trinket traders, snake-charmers, and storytellers who will throng it in
the desert cool of evening.
But in the oasis sanctuary of the
Ksar Char-Bagh, all is balmy dolce far niente. A luxe spa hostelry built
in imitation of a castle-like fort in the middle of the Palmeraie, it
has crenellated towers that hide a private dipping pool and afford views
down to a central marbled courtyard modeled on Granada’s Moorish
Alhambra, and across the palm groves to the distant Atlas Mountains.
Guests are lounging poolside in the shade of an allée of date palms,
seemingly oblivious of the Academy Award–winning deity in their midst,
who is the focus of the
Vogue cover shoot in full fluster around them.
Lupita
Nyong’o is cucumber-cool, as beautiful and hieratic as an ancient
Egyptian statue of a cat goddess, dressed in Prada’s magenta Deco-print
dress licked with silver that is dazzling against her luminous skin.
Lupita instinctively falls into graceful attitudes; she can’t help
herself. “She knows the camera, she knows her angles,” notes an
approving Phyllis Posnick,
Vogue’s Executive Fashion Editor,
who, it should be noted, does not suffer fools gladly but is in some
kind of awe of this particular subject.
It is easy to see why.
Lupita, 31, is as preternaturally poised as a prewar debutante, with a
carefully modulated, cut-crystal accent and a quaint use of English to
match. When she discusses one of the most harrowing scenes in the
infinitely harrowing
12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen’s
magisterial movie in which she made her unforgettable screen debut as
the tormented slave girl Patsey, she describes her character,
delicately, as being “completely disrobed.”
See Lupita Nyong’o’s best red carpet looks.
At
the BAFTAs at London’s Royal Opera House in February, I happened to
follow Lupita’s blindingly flash-lit entrance on the red carpet as she
artfully manipulated the emerald-green organza Dior ball gown billowing
around her. There was nothing in this swanlike apparition to suggest how
stressful the relentless awards-show circuit can be. “Still waters run
deep,” she explains with an enigmatic smile.
In all, Lupita
attended 60-some promotional events during a grueling five-month odyssey
that began with the Toronto Film Festival in early September 2013
(where she first blazoned the promise of fashion stardom in Prada’s
white jersey goddess dress, trellised with golden sequins). Small wonder
that
The New York Times’s Guy Trebay noted the “military
precision” with which her management and stylists approached the
campaign to conquer the red carpet and burn Lupita’s image into the
collective consciousness—garnering her, among other things, a lucrative
contract with Lancôme. (As Isabella Rossellini, the international face
of the brand for more than a decade, beginning in 1983, describes it,
“Having this contract is winning the lottery” and provided her with “the
freedom to make only the films that I liked and not the films I
didn’t.”)
Lupita appreciates the fact that Lancôme’s brand
ambassadors, who currently include Julia Roberts, Kate Winslet, and
Penélope Cruz, “are very different, unique women—it’s not about
conforming to an already established idea of what is beautiful, and I
like that.” In her meetings with the beauty house’s executives, she
echoed powerful sentiments she expressed in a speech earlier in the year
at the
Essence Black Women in Hollywood Luncheon. “I remember a
time when I too felt unbeautiful,” she told the audience that day, and
described the sensation of having a flower bloom inside her when the
Sudanese-born Alek Wek appeared on the modeling scene in the
mid-nineties.
Over dinner at Le Tobsil, a spice-colored riad
restaurant in the medina, she tells me, “I felt how valuable and vital
such representation is.”
As we are serenaded by the hypnotic
chant of the Gnawa musicians in the adjoining courtyard, I suggest to
Lupita that she must have had a completely surreal year. “Indeed I did,”
she says, laughing. “It just feels like the entertainment industry
exploded into my life. People who seemed so distant all of a sudden were
right in front of me and recognizing me—before I recognized them!” Her
first real intimation that her life was changing—probably forever—came
after the SAG Awards in January, when she arrived late one night at the
airport and was mobbed by paparazzi. “For a split second I looked behind
me to see who they were flashing at—and it was me!” she remembers.
“That was, I think, the beginning of the end of my anonymity.”
Though,
as she recalls with a laugh, she lived for three years as a student in
pants and a sweatshirt, Lupita has always enjoyed fashion. Growing up in
Kenya, she designed many of her own clothes “because it was cheaper
than buying retail,” including her own prom dress when she graduated
from the all-boys high school she attended in Nairobi—girls were
accepted only in two advanced-placement classes. “It was a velvet
miniskirt with a matching little top and an iridescent silver
translucent fabric that flowed to the ground,” she remembers. “It was
kind of ridiculous, but it was fabulous at the time.”
Lupita
realized that she needed a more considered approach to her fashion
choices as she prepared for the formidable season of appearances for
12 Years a Slave. She had worked with and befriended Michelle Dockery (
Downton Abbey’s Lady Mary) on
Non-Stop
(a rollicking suspense vehicle for Liam Neeson that was released two
days before the Academy Awards, with Lupita—in what more than one critic
described as a meager role—as a flight attendant alongside Dockery).
Dockery introduced her to her stylist, Micaela Erlanger, a protégée of
the late Annabel Tollman, who helped shape the red-carpet personas of
Scarlett Johansson and Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, among others.
Lupita
arrived for their first meeting armed with a Pinterest board of fashion
ideas that appealed to her: “Bold color, interesting print, interesting
silhouette—simple but architectural and feminine,” Erlanger remembers.
“Elegance, but with a sense of humor.”
The pair proceeded to meet
for “epic six-hour fittings,” says Lupita. “It’s a job; it’s work, you
know!” she tells me. “We’d just try, try, try, try, try, try, try. At
first it was very daunting, but I ended up really having fun with it.”
Their choices have run the gamut from Christopher Kane and Sacai to
custom Prada and Chanel Haute Couture. Most times, she adds, “especially
for the bigger awards, the dress let me know it was going to be worn.
It’s quite scary when you fall in love with a dress, because it’s
nothing to do with your brain. It’s like a gut reaction.” The caped
scarlet Ralph Lauren gown for the Golden Globes was a case in point: “We
got goose bumps,” remembers Erlanger of that fitting. “I told her,
‘This is going to be a game-changer.’ And it was.”
Lupita was
cast in Miu Miu’s spring campaign alongside Elizabeth Olsen, Elle
Fanning, and Bella Heathcote, and attended the label’s fashion show in
Paris, dressed in a collared burgundy sweater under the sort of stiff
little coat that Britain’s royal children have traditionally worn—the
prim Good Girl foil to her front-row neighbor, Rihanna, who was working
an eighties banjee-girl look in a runway-fresh Prada shearling coat, a
plunging décolleté, and a Cleopatra bob.
As for Lupita’s short
crop, which she has worn since she was nineteen, hairstylists Ted
Gibson, Larry Sims, and Vernon François have worked such iterations as a
two-pronged Mohawk, a Grace Jones flat-top crew cut, a widow’s peak,
and a Gumby. The bold and adventurous makeup choices she makes with Nick
Barose, meanwhile, annex beauty as a virtual accessory to her wardrobe.
“You spend so much time with your glam squad,” says Lupita. “Their
energy is the last thing you experience before you leave the hotel
room—and they make it fun and light and manageable.”
Before she
embarked on her fashion marathon, “everyone said, ‘Brace yourself,
Lupita! Keep a granola bar in that clutch of yours!’ ” she confides. “I
didn’t really understand what they meant, and it was only once it was
past that I realized that my body had been holding on by a thread to get
through this very intense experience. Nothing can prepare you for
awards season,” she continues. “The red carpet feels like a war zone,
except you cannot fly or fight; you just have to stand there and take
it.” She considers for a moment. “I hope they don’t make that the big
quote!” she says, laughing. “Because that would be sad! Tell them not to
do that!”
It is understandable that Lupita would hesitate to
trivialize the idea of internecine strife. Her current beau, the
Somali-born rapper K’naan, has a preternatural serenity of his own that
belies a childhood of unimaginable ferocity in his civil war–torn
homeland, when he saw playmates die. (He fled with his family to
Toronto, where, like so many of his disenchanted, rootless compatriots,
he turned to a life of petty crime before reinventing himself through
music, achieving global recognition when he adapted the lyrics of his
anthemic “Wavin’ Flag” to become Coke’s official 2010 FIFA World Cup
song.)
Lupita’s childhood, though privileged, was hardly settled.
Her father, Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o, a political-science professor,
opposed the government of Daniel arap Moi, whose turbulent presidency
lasted 24 years. Nyong’o’s brother “disappeared,” and Nyong’o was
eventually self-exiled to Mexico, where Lupita was born in 1983. (Her
name, in the symbolic Luo tradition, is a play on the word
luo itself, which means “to follow,” and
Peter
is her father’s name, so that run together they suggest “I followed
Peter to Mexico.” Lupita also speaks Swahili.) The family eventually
returned to Nairobi, where her father continued to face intermittent
persecution by the system, which changed with the election of Mwai
Kibaki in 2002. He is currently a senator in the Kenyan parliament. He
is also, let it be noted, an actor manqué, with a passion for
Shakespeare, instilling in his daughter, along with her five siblings,
an appetite for performance since childhood. “My family is very
close-knit,” she explains. “My aunt, who was an actor herself, would get
all us children together to write and perform plays. I loved
manipulating my parents’ emotions.” When her mother, Dorothy, cried out
at the tragic denouement of one of the plays, Lupita remembers “feeling
very powerful.” They are clearly close; Dorothy has often accompanied
her to awards shows, as have her siblings, including her acting-mad
little brother, Peter. In Morocco, hearing that Dorothy fretted that her
daughter wasn’t eating enough, Lupita spelled out
I Love You with her Ksar Char-Bagh breakfast fruit and sent it to her as a charming freeze-frame iPhone video on Mother’s Day.
At
fourteen, Lupita secured her first legitimate role, playing Juliet with
the Phoenix Players, Nairobi’s “vibrant semiprofessional theater,” and
experienced the same thrill when the performance brought the audience to
tears at the end. “That was when I realized that I really loved this
thing called playacting.”
Lupita’s father has a master’s degree
and a doctorate from the University of Chicago, and, like many
middle-class Kenyans, Lupita was expected to continue her higher
education abroad. So in 2003, at the age of 20, she began taking classes
in film and African studies at Hampshire College in Massachusetts—an
experience that she found to be “a major culture shock” after her
self-described “very conservative” schooling in Kenya. “I felt like I
needed rules,” she says, “but in the end, it taught me that I am very
self-motivated—I can make my own rules!”
While at Hampshire, Lupita went home to Kenya and managed to finagle herself into working on the set of
The Constant Gardener,
which was shooting there. She met its star Ralph Fiennes and confided
in him her passion to act. He firmly told her not to pursue it as a
career unless it was something “I couldn’t live without”—advice that, as
she admits, “gave me pause.”
In Kenya, as she notes, acting
“wasn’t a viable career path; it’s not necessarily seen as a prestigious
profession.” Expectations ran high: Her cousin Isis Nyong’o (a former
VP and managing director of the African operations of InMobi, the
independent mobile advertising network) has been cited by
Forbes as one of Africa’s most successful women.
After
undergraduate studies, Lupita returned home to Kenya, and she
experienced something of an existential crisis before having “this vivid
image of myself at 60, looking back at my life and really regretting
that I hadn’t tried to be an actor. That was the dawn that I needed to
start pursuing this.”
She applied to Yale; if it didn’t work out,
she would return to production. She had already written, directed, and
produced a documentary for her Hampshire thesis project:
In My Genes,
about a friend’s experience living with albinism in Kenya, where the
condition is considered a bad omen and those born with it are subject to
discrimination—and worse (“I traveled all those thousands of miles just
to learn about my next-door neighbor!” says Lupita).
Without a
theater library in Nairobi, Lupita reverted to her Juliet, and to high
school pieces to perform for her Yale application, which involved
auditioning on one day and waiting to hear whether you were going to be
called back a month later.
During the interview, she was asked
when she was planning to return to Kenya. “After callbacks,” she
replied. “They laughed, but it was true. I had to make that call, and
that was of course very scary and presumptuous, but I was not going to
sell myself short.” Lupita was accepted but delayed her arrival to
appear in
Shuga, the groundbreaking Kenyan soap opera that was
produced by the MTV Staying Alive Foundation, in collaboration with the
Kenyan government, intended to promote “responsible sexual behavior and
tolerance.” (It was aired in 46 African countries and subsequently in
over sixteen more around the world.)
When she finally arrived at
Yale, among so many dedicated students, the experience was revelatory,
even if the schedule was unforgiving—“In one day you’re playing five
different characters,” and between class and rehearsals she was often
studying from 9:00 in the morning until 1:00 the following morning. But
even so, as she prepared for her final-semester showcases (presented in
New York and Los Angeles to a packed house of agents, managers,
producers, and casting directors), she was also working on an audition
tape for the role of Patsey.
By his account, Steve McQueen had already seen “thousands” of actresses for the role, but when he saw that tape, as he told
Vogue, “It was like looking for a piece of glass on a sandy beach and finding a jewel. . . . She has this aura about her.”
Working
with his cinematographer, Sean Bobbitt (“They are like tango dancers,”
notes Lupita), and filming her scenes in an almost documentary way,
McQueen (who won Britain’s prestigious Turner Prize in 1999 as a video
artist) potently captured that aura onscreen.
“I was really nervous about seeing myself in
12 Years a Slave,”
says Lupita, “because it had been such a profound experience in all
ways. I remember it being one of the most joyful times in my life—and
also one of the most sorrowful. I didn’t want my experience to be a vain
one. But I will say that when I watched it, my heartstrings were pulled
so tight for Solomon that I couldn’t go into the ego trip. I cried—I
mean, I was inconsolable. I wept for an hour after the movie.”
Lupita’s
tears were the beginning of a journey that led to her Academy Award. “I
had already gotten the nomination, which was truly, truly astounding,
and enough,” she remembers. “Even in my dreams of being an actor, my
dream was not in the celebrity. My dream was in the work that I wanted
to do.”
When her name was read out, the experience was, as she
recalls, “very confusing, very numbing. I was just repeating my name in
my head, so I didn’t know whether I had said my name or they had said my
name! And then my little brother screamed, and time was suspended and
it was just noise in my head.”
As Lupita gathered those
voluminous silk georgette pleats of her custom Prada skirts, she
remembers that all she could think was “Don’t fall on those stairs”
because, as she drolly explains, “it’s not cute if you follow Jennifer
Lawrence—it’s not cute if you’re the second one!”
“People are
still filling me in on what happened after,” she adds. “My mother says I
cried during the speech; I don’t believe her.”
Those waters do
indeed run deep: She was memorably poised, her acceptance speech a model
of erudition. “When I look down at this golden statue,” she said, “may
it remind me and every little child that no matter where you’re from,
your dreams are valid.”
So it was that Lupita appeared to
spring into our lives fully formed, both as a consummate movie actress
receiving her profession’s highest honor and as an intriguing fashion
star and superlative beauty icon. She is quick to note that her “red
carpet” self “is just one aspect of me; it doesn’t represent the
entirety of me, which I am at peace with.”
She keeps her private
life just that. “The safest thing is when I’m indoors in my world,” she
says, which for the moment is an apartment in Brooklyn. When she isn’t
cooking at home (“I like to cook whole fish. And I make some mean
salads”), she is enjoying the borough’s unpretentious restaurants and
bars.
The complicated question of how to follow Lupita’s dream
debut is one that has clearly been exercising the actress and her
management, who recently confirmed that she will be providing the voice
for Raksha in Disney’s live-action/CGI hybrid revisiting of
The Jungle Book. The news that she’d also been cast alongside Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver, and
Game of Thrones star Gwendoline Christie in J. J. Abrams’s
Star Wars: Episode VII,
out Christmas 2015, meanwhile, sent the Internet into a collective
frenzy. “I’m going to a galaxy far, far away,” Lupita told me with a
laugh as the announcement was made in early June.
In the
meantime, she says, “I’m really hungry to get back onstage. It flexes
muscles that you need to do the more subtle film work.” She is
particularly keen on the writing of the actor-playwright Danai Gurira
and loves her plays
Eclipsed, about the Liberian civil war, and
The Convert,
set in southern Africa, about the birth of Christianity on the
continent. Like her boyfriend, K’naan, she is very engaged by the myriad
issues confronting their homelands. She recently signed on to both
coproduce—in partnership with Brad Pitt’s Plan B and two other
partners—and star in an adaptation of Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie’s acclaimed novel about the African immigrant experience,
Americanah.
“The book blew me away,” she tells me. “This was a project I wanted to
work on, and I pursued it with all my being. It’s an unabashedly
romantic book, really inspiring and uplifting. I found myself in her
pages.”
On top of all that, she has a yen for some more
Shakespeare. “I thought I’d had my fill at Yale, but . . . oh, boy, I
guess there’s nothing like the Bard!” she says, laughing. “I absolutely
adore
Twelfth Night.” She adds that in the future, Cleopatra and “Lady M” are top of her wish list.
As a child watching
Star Wars
for the first time, Lupita was intrigued by R2-D2 and C-3PO. “They just
resonated with me,” she says. “Being able to convey emotions with just a
few digital sounds—it speaks of good storytelling.” That storytelling
is still holding her in thrall. “It’s a wonderful opportunity to be
working in these fantastical realms,” she says. “They’re worlds away
from
12 Years a Slave, that’s for sure—but that kind of diversity is what dreams are made of.”
For more from Vogue,
download the digital edition from iTunes, Kindle, Nook Color, and Next Issue.
Pharrell’s “Marilyn Monroe” cover
is visually stunning. The chocolate face against that fire engine red
was striking and super fierce. Plus, the model herself is gorgeous.
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