Lupita Nyong’o is having a very good year, what with A Quiet Place: Day One being a respectable mid-budget hit this summer, and now The Wild Robot putting together an impressive run for a non-Pixar, non-Illumination animated film. Next year, she will star as Viola in Free Shakespeare in the Park’s new staging of Twelfth Night, co-starring Sandra Oh, Peter Dinklage, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson. She was also just named an ambassador for Chanel, which will hopefully work out better for her than it has Margot Robbie.
Lupita is profiled in Harper’s Bazaar UK’s November issue, talking about her year of upheaval, after moving to Los Angeles, splitting from that man whose name I already forgot, and adopting her one true love, her cat Yoyo. Lupita is loudly and proudly part of the Childless Cat Lady ranks.
Given how busy she is, and that The Wild Robot is a contender for the animation Oscar (destined to lose to Inside Out 2, but enjoy the parties!), we’ll probably see Lupita on the trophy trail, undoubtedly dressed in Chanel. If she looks half as good as she does in this photo spread, we’re in for a treat. She looks SPECTACULAR in these photos.
Lupita is always an interesting interview because she’s smart and thoughtful and seems interested in the world around her, which isn’t a given with actors. I do feel this profile stays very surface level, but the bit about supermodel Alek Wek helping a younger Lupita embrace her dark skin, and in turn her writing a book, Sulwe, to hopefully do the same for a new generation of dark-skinned girls learning to love themselves is moving. I wish they dug into that a little more, especially how it relates to Lupita’s presence in Hollywood. There’s no denying she is a star, but it’s also interesting that some of her biggest roles after winning an Oscar have been animated.
It’s just something I would love to hear Lupita talk about, her post-Oscar career, the roles she gets offered, how she’s leveraged fashion to her benefit. This interview does not go to those places, though she does say she “listens to her intuition” when choosing roles. I am just SO curious to know what the offers look like versus what she’s accepting. She exploded onto the scene in 2012 with 12 Years a Slave, winning an Oscar for her first film role, less than a year after graduating from Yale drama.
That’s more than ten years ago now, and while she has most certainly been part of big projects, it still really stands out to me that right after winning an Oscar her biggest roles were animated, and ten-plus years later, she’s not yet been nominated again (she should have been for Us, but the Academy’s genre bias is real), though she has white peers who have multiple nominations in the same period. I know she has thoughts on this! She’s too smart not to! But it feels like we’re STILL dancing around the reality that even winning Oscars isn’t enough to level the playing field for Black actresses.
On a more personal note, she does not specifically mention Joshua Jackson, but she is certainly talking like she’s single, saying, “If I'm ever so lucky to be in a romantic relationship again, it'll be because of [Yoyo]. […] I was ready to shut that door and lock it and bolt it. He has ensured that my heart remains open.”
Given that this profile is in the November issue, published at the beginning of October, it means this interview was done at least a month ago. That lines up with the notion that she and JJ probably broke up in September, and probably earlier rather than later in the month. It also makes me wonder if JJ was a rebound situation after she dumped that other dude, a spring/summer fling to have as a post-heartbreak treat. We’ll probably never know because Lupita rarely talks about her personal life, putting that dude on blast was a rarity, but the nosy Nellie in me would like to know.
