Daily Times

Lupita Nyong’o walks tall, much taller than her height. Her mother, Dorothy, once said that her family will forever tease her about how she walks: as if she believes she’s six feet tall. She is cool, straight-backed, circumspect. She doesn’t ooze emotion the way many young Americans do. She orders the green eggs and lamb, and lets the joke speak for itself, not offering a gratuitous laugh. But once we start speaking about her work, she’s all in, as if able to forget the public Lupita for a moment or two, slip inside the details of story and character, and let go.

Around Christmas of 2014, Lupita got an email from the director Mira Nair with the script for ‘Queen of Katwe’, which tells how Phiona Mutesi, an uneducated girl from the slums of Uganda, rises to become the chess champion of her country and an international chess master. Nair wanted her to play Phiona’s mother, Harriet. “Five pages in I wrote my manager and agent with the words ‘I must do this film’,” says Lupita.

“To play a mother of four in Uganda, a formidable mother who has so much working against her, was so compelling to me. It wasn’t something I thought I’d be asked to do”-at least not by Hollywood. “The fact that it was based on a true story, an uplifting story out of Africa.” She inhales and shakes her head. “Oh, my goodness, all my dreams were coming true in that script.”

She played a 15-year-old Liberian called the Girl, sheltering with wives numbers one and three of a Liberian commander who is never seen onstage. The Girl is forced to become the fourth wife until Maima, a warrior with an AK-47, shows up and persuades her to escape captivity and join the fight. Lupita gave an incredibly physical performance. She leaped, wailed, hid, manipulated her face in the exaggerated way children do. She inhabited the child’s naïveté and ruthlessness, and crumbled, too, like a child.

“Lupita employs a powerful intellect in her work and makes very deep, very intricate choices. And she’s just relentless in her pursuit of authenticity and specificity of the character,” says Gurira, who is an actress as well as a playwright. “She is 150 percent every second, doing more and more work offstage, growing in her understanding of that world. It’s a dream for a writer.” It’s what Lupita said she needed “after that long roller-coaster ride that culminated in the Academy Awards.” For Nyong’o, 2014 was a year that only happens in fairy tales or Hollywood, a year that spun the then-31-year-old actress of ’12 Years a Slave’ into an icon of fashion, beauty, and cool, a star whose combination of grace and mischief and timing on the scene broke a colour barrier that never should have existed. In the six months leading up to the Oscars, she swirled through 66 red carpets. She was dubbed People’s Most Beautiful Person and appeared on the cover of multiple magazines. “But it was all not acting,” she says.

The director of ’12 Years a Slave’, artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen, who continues to be a guiding voice for her, told her, “You have to go right back to the beginning, to when you saw your first film or dressed up, and remind yourself what the purpose is, why you got into the profession, because you get seduced by the obvious.” And so Lupita harnessed her newly minted Oscar power to bring ‘Eclipsed’ to the stage. And with ‘Queen of Katwe’ and the forthcoming film adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah-and even to some extent with her fantasy roles as the pirate Maz Kanata in ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’, Nakia in Marvel’s Black Panther, mother wolf Raksha in Disney’s new Jungle Book-Lupita is using her stature to reshape the way the world sees itself, to reflect images that have always been present but weren’t being looked at.

She didn’t set out with a mission to tell these African stories, Lupita says. It happened organically. “Being able to use my platform to expand and diversify the African voice,” she says, searching for the right words, “I feel very passionate about that. It feels intentional, meaningful.” There’s something about Lupita that also feels intentional, as if she had been groomed, designed even, to be a messenger, to bear with poise the privilege and burden of her newfound fame. Mira Nair has known her for many years almost as a daughter. Lupita interned for Nair on ‘The Namesake’.