We do not get off to a flying start. Prim, proper and precise – “What do you mean?” she asks more than once – Lupita Nyong’o hesitates, arms lightly folded, as I thrust out my hand with a customary “How d’you do?” It is, to be fair, an indelicate motion, but finally she acquiesces with a regal clasp, then perches lightly back on her chair. Gosh, she’s classy.
A graduate of Hampshire College and Yale, she articulates with beautifully polished vowels. Thinking back to interviews with her well-spoken 12 Years a Slave costars David Oyelowo and Benedict Cumberbatch, I can imagine them in a plum-sounds stand-off.
The daughter of a Kenyan politician and former minister, Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o, she seems like someone who was prepared for public life long before her Academy Award win, in 2013. But she laughs off the idea that they were ever a particularly political dynasty behind closed doors.
“We didn’t often engage in straight-up political discourse at home,” she says. “Because that was the work that my father needed a break from. But I think we were definitely raised with a sense of civic duty and social responsibility.”
Fleeing the regime of Kenya’s president at the time, Daniel arap Moi, Peter Nyong’o and his wife, Dorothy, relocated to Mexico, where he lectured in political science and where Lupita, the second of six children, was born. They returned to Kenya when Lupita – her name is a diminutive of Guadalupe – was still a toddler.
12 Years a Slave was her first Hollywood role and her first job out of Yale School of Drama, but she took a roundabout route. Encouraged towards academia by her parents, she attended international schools and worked on film sets. In 2005, as an unpaid production assistant on The Constant Gardener, she quizzed Ralph Fiennes for tips.
“In a very casual conversation at lunch he asked me what it was I wanted to do with my life, and I whispered to him that I kind of wanted to do what he was doing. His advice to me was, ‘Do it only if you feel you can’t live without it.’ That was very hard to hear. Because you want to hear, ‘Oh, that’s great: here is a person you should call.’ Instead he really challenged me about why I wanted to be an actor. Because from the outside it looks so luxurious and glossy and easy. But you go through a lot of disappointments and hardships. And it can be very compromising. That’s especially true for women.”
Undeterred, in 2008 she appeared in a Brooklyn-shot short film and a Kenyan TV series, Shuga. The following year, as part of her final-year thesis, she wrote, directed and produced In My Genes, a documentary study of black Kenyans with albinism.
Skin colour, she notes, “is a fixation just about everywhere in the world”. She has previously spoken about a casting agent who told her she was “too dark to be on TV” and about a letter she received from an African girl, stating: “I was just about to buy Dencia’s Whitenicious cream to lighten my skin when you appeared on the world map and saved me.”
In this spirit she has made a huge dent in the traditionally skinny, white fashion industry: she has been the face of Lancôme since 2014, the year she became the second African woman to feature on the cover of Vogue. "Western standards of beauty are something that very few of us can escape from," she says.
Myong’o is determined to make similar inroads in the film industry. “I want to play a role in making opportunities for people of colour. Mira Nair has a film school – the Maisha Film Lab – which has a motto: If we don’t tell our own stories no one else will.”
Nair, the director of Mississippi Masala, moved a decade or so ago to Uganda, where she began a training programme for aspiring film-makers from east Africa. Nyong'o first worked for Nair as a production assistant on a 2006 movie, The Namesake: "I was in charge of film equipment and things like that at the lab."
Chess champion
Today, having migrated to the other side of the camera, Nyong’o is on promotional duties as the star of Nair’s new movie,
Queen of Katwe
, a grand, life-affirming feelgood flick inspired by Phiona Mutesi, a chess champion from the Kampala slum of Katwe.
“I had no idea about Phiona,” says Nyong’o, who plays Mutesi’s mother. “The first time I knew of her story was from reading the script. I knew in less than 10 pages that I had to be a part of this. Because this story is an anthem for dreaming out loud, which is something I truly believe in. You have to speak up for the world you want to live in.”
Pundits and industry insiders have been surprised to note that Queen of Katwe is a Disney movie. Sure, the Phiona Mutesi story has all the elements for a punch-the-air denouement. But much of the action takes place in Ugandan slums, against a backdrop of horrendous poverty.
“I wasn’t shocked by what was around us,” says Nyong’o. “I grew up in Kenya, which is right across the border from Uganda, and I have been exposed to abject poverty all my life. My parents raised us to understand that where we were on the class spectrum would not necessarily always be where we stayed. They deliberately exposed us to life in the slums. I used to go shopping for second-hand clothes in slums, as we all do in east Africa. I had relatives and friends that lived in the slums. I also had friends who lived in huge mansions with sprawling lawns. So I was able to see and understand that poverty doesn’t define a person. Nor does it define what they can contribute to the world. So this wasn’t a foreign world at all. But, of course, actually considering it, and taking it personally, will give you an empathy like nothing else will.”
Just as Queen of Katwe is a new kind of Disney film, Nyong'o is a new kind of Disney star. This past year she has featured in Disney's Jungle Book reboot, to ecstatic notices and almost $1 billion at the box office. Next year she'll appear opposite Chadwick Boseman in Marvel's (Disney-owned) Black Panther and the (Disney-owned) Star Wars: Episode VIII, where she'll reprise her role as Maz Kanata from Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
"I know, I know," she says, smiling. "JJ Abrams keeps saying I should have my own Disney festival. But you know what? This is the studio that has given me the most variety. None of my Disney projects look like each other. Disney – and Mira – made Queen of Katwe happen. But only because Tendo Nagenda, who is an executive at Disney, found the story and saw the magic and the Disneyness of the film."
Queen of Katwe is, she hopes, not a fluke. Looking at contenders for the 2017 Oscars, including such high-profile African-American stories as Fences and Birth of a Nation, it does feel as though Hollywood is working its way towards some kind of cultural reparation.
"The year that I won the Academy Award for 12 Years a Slave was a year where it seemed like something was shifting. And this year, again, there's a lot of promise with the films that are out there. There's a hope that inclusion will be the order of the day. But that takes more than a moment: that takes momentum. This only changes when we are active and positive and inclusive about what stories we tell, what stories we make happen and what stories we choose to see."
Queen of Katwe is on general release
