The winner of 2014’s Best Supporting Actress Academy Award said the achievement did not improve her career prospects.
Lupita Nyong’o won the Oscar race for starring in 12 Years a Slave in 2014. She revealed in a new interview that she was repeatedly offered more roles as an enslaved woman after her win. Nyong’o, a Kenyan-Mexican woman, was only the sixth Black woman to win the category in the Awards’ 97-year history.
“After I won the Academy Award, you’d think like, ‘Oh, I’m going to get the lead roles here and there,’” she told CNN. “But it’s, ‘Oh, Lupita. We’d like you to do another movie where you’re a slave, but this time you’re on a slave ship.’ Those are the kinds of offers I was getting in the months after winning my Academy Award.”
The Steve McQueen-directed drama about the true story of Solomon Northup, a Black man who was sold into slavery in 1841, was Nyong’o’s first film.
“My winning an Academy Award came at the very start of my career,” the actress told the outlet. “It was for the first film I had ever done. So, it really did set the paces for everything I’ve done since,” and not always in the best ways, she continued.
“It was a very tender time because the world—now there’s an expectation for you and your career,” she added. “There were think pieces about ‘Oh, is this the beginning and end of this dark-skinned Black woman, African woman’s career?’ And I had to deafen myself to all those pontificators because at the end of the day, I’m not a theory, I’m an actual person.”
As time crept away from the immediate aftermath of her Oscar win, Nyong’o was able to add several more notable roles to her credits and ultimately landed the starring role in 2019’s Us, for which she won an NAACP Image Award. She’s also appeared in several blockbuster films, leaving her mark on the popular movie franchises Star Wars, Black Panther, and A Quiet Place.
She’s kept her roles diverse, spanning voice and animation work.
“I like to be a joyful warrior for changing the paradigms of what it means to be African. And if that means that I work one job less a year to ensure that I’m not perpetuating the stereotypes that are expected of people from my continent, then let me do that,” she concluded.
