Lupita Nyong'o's First Vogue Cover

In little more than a year, Lupita Nyong’o has made the leap from serious student to Oscar-winning actress and head-turning fashion star. Hamish Bowles catches up with Hollywood’s newest golden girl! You can checkout her beautiful African inspired pictures from next month's issue of Vogue magazine, when you continue

Lupita Nyong’o is cucumber-cool, as beautiful and hieratic as an ancient Egyptian statue of a cat goddess, dressed in Prada’s magenta Deco-print dress licked with silver that is dazzling against her luminous skin. Lupita instinctively falls into graceful attitudes; she can’t help herself. “She knows the camera, she knows her angles,” notes an approving Phyllis Posnick, Vogue’s Executive Fashion Editor, who, it should be noted, does not suffer fools gladly but is in some kind of awe of this particular subject.

On her childhood

Though privileged, was hardly settled. Her father, Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o, a political-science professor, opposed the government of Daniel arap Moi, whose turbulent presidency lasted 24 years. Nyong’o’s brother “disappeared,” and Nyong’o was eventually self-exiled to Mexico, where Lupita was born in 1983. (Her name, in the symbolic Luo tradition, is a play on the word luo itself, which means “to follow,” and Peter is her father’s name, so that run together they suggest “I followed Peter to Mexico.” Lupita also speaks Swahili.) The family eventually returned to Nairobi, where her father continued to face intermittent persecution by the system, which changed with the election of Mwai Kibaki in 2002. He is currently a senator in the Kenyan parliament. He is also, let it be noted, an actor manqué, with a passion for Shakespeare, instilling in his daughter, along with her five siblings, an appetite for performance since childhood. “My family is very close-knit,” she explains. “My aunt, who was an actor herself, would get all us children together to write and perform plays. I loved manipulating my parents’ emotions.” When her mother, Dorothy, cried out at the tragic denouement of one of the plays, Lupita remembers “feeling very powerful.” They are clearly close; Dorothy has often accompanied her to awards shows, as have her siblings, including her acting-mad little brother, Peter. In Morocco, hearing that Dorothy fretted that her daughter wasn’t eating enough, Lupita spelled out I Love You with her Ksar Char-Bagh breakfast fruit and sent it to her as a charming freeze-frame iPhone video on Mother’s Day.

On her first role play

At fourteen, Lupita secured her first legitimate role, playing Juliet with the Phoenix Players, Nairobi’s “vibrant semiprofessional theater,” and experienced the same thrill when the performance brought the audience to tears at the end. “That was when I realized that I really loved this thing called playacting.”

Back in Kenya In Kenya, as she notes, acting “wasn’t a viable career path; it’s not necessarily seen as a prestigious profession.” Expectations ran high: Her cousin Isis Nyong’o (a former VP and managing director of the African operations of InMobi, the independent mobile advertising network) has been cited by Forbes as one of Africa’s most successful women.

After undergraduate studies, Lupita returned home to Kenya, and she experienced something of an existential crisis before having “this vivid image of myself at 60, looking back at my life and really regretting that I hadn’t tried to be an actor. That was the dawn that I needed to start pursuing this.”

As a student of Yale

When she finally arrived at Yale, among so many dedicated students, the experience was revelatory, even if the schedule was unforgiving—“In one day you’re playing five different characters,” and between class and rehearsals she was often studying from 9:00 in the morning until 1:00 the following morning. But even so, as she prepared for her final-semester showcases (presented in New York and Los Angeles to a packed house of agents, managers, producers, and casting directors), she was also working on an audition tape for the role of Patsey. 

On her private life

She keeps her private life just that. “The safest thing is when I’m indoors in my world,” she says, which for the moment is an apartment in Brooklyn. When she isn’t cooking at home (“I like to cook whole fish. And I make some mean salads”), she is enjoying the borough’s unpretentious restaurants and bars.

On Star Wars 
As a child watching Star Wars for the first time, Lupita was intrigued by R2-D2 and C-3PO. “They just resonated with me,” she says. “Being able to convey emotions with just a few digital sounds—it speaks of good storytelling.” That storytelling is still holding her in thrall. “It’s a wonderful opportunity to be working in these fantastical realms,” she says. “They’re worlds away from 12 Years a Slave, that’s for sure—but that kind of diversity is what dreams are made of.”