The 2009 role Lupita Nyong’o chose instead of Hollywood: “Expectations be damned”
As the years go by, there’s one constant in the film world, and that is that the arrival of a new Christopher Nolan movie is a very big deal indeed. That is becoming more and more the case with each release he makes, and The Odyssey, starring a host of talent including Lupita Nyong’o, could be his biggest yet.
We’re now about six weeks away from Nolan’s ancient Greek epic landing in IMAX around the world, and the hype has been building for well over a year now; advance tickets to see the film on the largest screens possible sold out 12 months ago and were changing hands for well over face value. It could well outdo 2023’s Oppenheimer, which brought in just shy of $1billion at the box office.
Nyong’o will play Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra in Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s mammoth work in a cast that is fearsomely stuffed with male and female talent, including Matt Damon, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland and more.
It represents perhaps the pinnacle so far of her career, which has seen her move around the world, from Mexico to Kenya to Hollywood, starting off on a production crew on movies like 2004’s The Constant Gardener, then making her own documentaries before a breakthrough role in 2013’s historical drama 12 Years a Slave.
Her performance in that film was so powerful that she won ‘Best Actress’ at the Oscars the following year at the first time of asking, and at that point, many expected she would use the exposure to throw herself fully into movie making. But that didn’t prove to be the case, although she did appear as a CGI character in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, instead pivoting to live theatre and New York’s Broadway for a play that featured the first-ever all-Black, all-female cast, called Eclipsed.
Written by Daniel Gurira and set in 2003, it told the story of five women and their tales of survival during the second Liberian civil war, originally premiering in Washington DC in 2009 before moving to London in 2015, then Broadway the following year. It proved to be a hit with both audiences and critics, scooping five Tony Award nominations, including one for ‘Best Actress’ for Nyong’o.
She was surprised at the time by people questioning why she would take to the stage so soon after winning an Oscar, telling TeenVogue, “I’m an actress; why wouldn’t I want to be in an incredible, gorgeous, meaty piece about the complicated choices of women during wartime? To me, it felt like a question about our value system in this culture, the ways we define success for ourselves as well as others.”
Despite winning the Academy Award and being nominated for the Tony for Eclipsed, Nyong’o added that she doesn’t feel that awards make her feel like she’s successful in what she does, explaining, “I knew there was a sense of what was expected of me, but this play felt so important to me that I had to do it, expectations be damned.”
When she returned to movies, though, she did it in an enormous way, with Marvel’s Black Panther becoming one of the all-conquering superhero hits of recent times, and winning huge acclaim for her role in Jordan Peele’s ultra-creepy thriller Us in 2019. Aside from Nolan’s massive movie, she’ll also be seen in a forthcoming drama with Jared Leto and John Mulaney called Lunik Heist, about American intelligence trying to steal a Soviet spacecraft from an exhibition in Mexico.
