Kenyan Hollywood actress Lupita Nyong’o has once again opened up about the tribulations she has encountered while code switching between her Kenyan accent and her American accent.
While speaking with South Africa’s Trevor Noah in his podcast What Now? Lupita narrated the moment she decided to lose her Kenyan accent in order to integrate seamlessly in the American film industry.
Lupita relayed that her first step towards losing her original accent was joining the Yale School of Drama because she did not want to be an instinctive actor. Lupita relayed that she wanted to work on aspects that she felt she was not good enough in and accents was one of them.
However, Lupita revealed that speaking in the American accent outside the context of her classroom felt like betrayal, saying, “I didn’t feel like myself and I cried many nights to sleep. Many many nights.”
“I didn’t know any other way to sound than myself. That was the first permission I gave myself but it was full of heartbreak and grief. Just grief. The process of deciding, ‘Okay, I’m going to start working on my American accent and I’m not going to allow myself to sound Kenyan’ so I’m like monitoring and really trying to understand my mouth in a technical way to like make these new sounds.”
Lupita described how the urge to quit sounding American always plagued her but because she had an end goal, she kept going, knowing she needed to be embraced by the people in the new country she was living in. She resorted to sticking to the accent in all aspects of her life sort of in like a method-acting way.
“I would call home and I would speak to them in an American accent. I was methodical with the accent. There were moments where I wanted to give up but I had this goal, I wanted to be able to succeed in an American market as an actor.”
Despite doing all the work and eventually learning to speak in the accent, Lupita recalls the feeling of betrayal she felt when she was offered a role in an African film and told to revert to her original accent.
“Now I did all that work just for someone to tell me no, now just go and sound like yourself. What? That was another betrayal. I was like, what do you mean? I have done all this so that I can come out here and people can be like, you don’t have an accent and now someone is telling me, oh actually, we need you just as you were. My God! So I had to do it again.”
She described the process of reverting to her African accent being just as grueling and her discovering that she had lost a part of herself but credited her mother who reminded her that her accent was a testament of her life experience.
“When I tried to return to my accent, I couldn’t find myself in my mouth, I couldn’t find the original part of me. My mom actually sent me a voice note of how I sounded in a speech I gave before I moved to America and it brought me to tears because I will never be able to sound like that and I never will.”
Even after all these challenges, Lupita stated that she was grateful for the opportunity her drama studies accorded her. She maintained that she would not have had the opportunity to muster up other African accents like Ugandan and Xhosa accents that have landed her roles like Queen of Katwe.
