Actress Lupita Nyong’o Poses For DuJour

The “12 Years A Slave” actress and Golden Globe nominee has just become the new face of Miu Miu and she’s also snagged the covers of numerous magazines including W and DuJour.

She  is also featured in the Telegraph, where she discusses first realizing that acting was a feasible goal, as well as the horrifying things she learned about slavery while studying for her breakout role as Patsey.

Here are some excerpts from the interview........

On growing up in the suburbs of Nairobi, Kenya
I loved make-believe. I was the child in the cupboard playing with my Barbies. [The Color Purple] was the first time I’d seen someone like me on screen. Whoopi Goldberg had my kind of hair and was dark like me. I thought, maybe I could do this for a living.

         On being nervous after being cast in “12 Years a Slave”

I was very intimidated. Every day I thought the phone was going to ring and it was going to be Steve saying, “I’m sorry, I made a mistake.” My parents had been very worried about what I was going to do.’ When she called [her father] with the news that she was going to be in a film with Brad Pitt, his only comment was, ‘Oh, so you have a job!’ ‘That put things into perspective,’ she says. ‘It was a job, and the intimidation of doing it with all these people had to be put aside.
On learning more about slavery for the film
[She also visited the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum in Baltimore.] ‘The first thing I saw when I walked in the door was a 500lb bale of cotton and it was taller than me, thicker than me, wider than me, and I was just met with the loftiness of Patsey.’ One of the most shocking things she learnt was that it was common to make accessories out of the skin of slaves that died. There were wallets and bags, and they were prized possessions. ‘It doesn’t get more horrific than that. I was stunned that I hadn’t even heard the name Solomon Northup,’ she continues. ‘In school we learnt about slavery but we spent more time learning about the Holocaust.’
On watching herself in the movie
‘I was a wreck,’ she says. ‘But it was cathartic. I was overwhelmed because there was such a shared, unspoken determination to make this film and it’s clear when you watch it.’

Here are the rest of her photos from the DuJour shoot....