Lupita Nyong’o is opening about her Hollywood career. In particular, she’s reflecting on her history-making Oscar win and the unexpected effect it had on her trajectory.
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If you’ll remember, in 2014, she took home the award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as an enslaved woman in “12 Years A Slave.” She became the first Kenyan and Mexican actress to receive the honor. Given the weight and prestige of moment, you would think that her phone would be ringing off the hook from various Hollywood execs begging her to be in their next film. And to a degree, that is sort of what happened–but not in the way she thought.
Speaking in a new interview for CNN “Inside Africa,” the “Black Panther” star revealed that while she did receive some phone calls after her major win–they were sadly for roles that were more of the same of what she’d already done and not lead roles.
“You know what’s interesting is that, after I won that Academy Award, you’d think, ‘Oh, I’m gonna get lead roles here and there.’ [Instead, it was], ‘Oh, Lupita, we’d like you to play another movie where you’re a slave, but this time you’re on a slave ship. Those are the kind of offers I was getting in the months after winning my Academy Award,” she told musician Angélique Kidjo.
She continued in part: “There were think-pieces about: ‘Is this the beginning and end of this dark-skinned Black African woman’s career?’ 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.”
If her sentiment sounds familiar, then you may recall Halle Berry saying the same thing after her 2002 Best Actress win at the Oscars–where she also made history as the first Black woman to ever win in that category. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly in 2021, she said that she thought that people would be knocking down her door with opportunities–but like Nyong’o, that wasn’t the case.
“When you have a historic win like that, you think, ‘Oh, this is going to fundamentally change,’” Berry said at the time. “It did fundamentally change me, but it didn’t change my place in the business overnight. I still had to go back to work. I still had to try to fight to make a way out of no way.”
Hearing these two talented actresses share damn-near the same story is truly sad. If that coveted gold statuette doesn’t bring about the opportunities in the same way it historically has and does for white actors and actresses–then it may be time to take a deeper look why and what that says about the industry and the implicit biases at work.
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