Her Hollywood debut won her an Oscar. Her first book is a number-one bestseller. She can even rap. For Lupita Nyong’o, as she tells Olivia Marks in the February issue of British Vogue, a supercharged career means being able to choose the stories that need to be told.
Lupita Nyong’o is someone who absolutely knows what she wants. “It’s passion,” Nyong’o tells Vogue’s features editor Olivia Marks, during their cover interview in Brooklyn at the end of last year.
“I definitely want to claim ambition, but I get very compulsive about the things I am passionate about, to the point of not sleeping. It’s very impractical. I fight the barriers that I form for myself, because they’re often ridiculous.”
For her next challenge Nyong’o will produce, and star in, an adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah.
“I had never seen the African contemporary experience explored, celebrated and analysed in such a way,” she says of the impact the story had on her.
“The observations she makes as a non-American black person about America are things that I had never articulated but had felt. I was just madly in love.”