Lupita Nyong’o Says Losing Kenyan Accent for Hollywood Roles ‘Felt Like Betrayal’ and ‘I Cried Many Nights to Sleep’ Not Feeling ‘Like Myself’

Lupita Nyong’o had to lose her Kenyan accent in order to become an American actor and take on different Hollywood roles, and she said during a recent episode of the “What Now? With Trevor Noah” podcast that it “felt like a betrayal” to herself when she made that decision. The Oscar winner was born in Mexico but spent her childhood in Kenya. She attended Yale School of Drama in the U.S. before breaking big in Hollywood.

“The first permission I gave myself to change my accent or allow my accent to transform was going to drama school,” Nyong’o said (via Entertainment Weekly). “I went to drama school because I didn’t want to just be an instinctive actor. I wanted to understand my instrument. I wanted to know what I was good at, what I was not good at, and work on the things that I wasn’t good at. And one of the things I wasn’t good at was accents.”

“The process of deciding, ‘OK, I’m going to start working on my American accent and I’m not going to allow myself to sound Kenyan,’ so that I’m like monitoring and really trying to understand my mouth in a technical way to like make these new sounds. Making those new sounds in a context that wasn’t the classroom felt like betrayal,” she added. “You know, I didn’t feel like myself and I cried many nights to sleep…many, many nights.”

Nyong’o’s first big break in Hollywood was her Oscar-winning role in Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave,” which opened the door to major studio tentpoles such as “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” (playing Maz Kanata via motion capture) and “Black Panther” (Nakia). She most recently appeared in Paramount’s “A Quiet Place: Day One,” and is currently in theaters with her voice-only role in the animated family adventure “The Wild Robot.”

Listen to Nyong’o’s full interview on the “What Now? With Trevor Noah” podcast here.