After dominating last season’s red carpet, Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o took a much deserved break from the spotlight. The Lancôme spokesperson looks refreshed and poised for the next chapter as she covers next month’s Glamour magazine. Inside the magazine, the A-lister opens up about her life, career and what it meant winning an Academy award.
Check out the excerpts below.
GLAMOUR:
Over the past year you’ve gone from being virtually unknown to winning an Academy Award for your first major motion-picture role. How has your life changed?
LUPITA NYONG’O:
“This is actually a conversation I look forward to having in 10 years, when all of this is behind me and I have some real perspective on what happened—because right now I’m still adjusting. I guess I feel catapulted into a different place; I have a little whiplash…. I did have a dream to be an actress, but I didn’t think about being famous. And I haven’t yet figured out how to be a celebrity; that’s something I’m learning, and I wish there were a course on how to handle it. I have to be aware that my kinesphere may be larger than I want it to be.”
GLAMOUR:
It’s hard to imagine anyone doing a better job of rising to the occasion, since you ended up winning an Academy Award! How did that feel? You’re at the Oscars, and you hear your name.
LN:
“I don’t think I will ever be able to really articulate how bizarre it was to hear my name at the Academy Awards. I’d watched in my pajamas the year before! I felt numb—dazed and confused. I remember feeling light—weightless. More like limbo than cloud nine. At first I was like, This is my statue; nobody gets to touch it. And by midnight I was like, Please, someone, take this statue; it’s too heavy! So I gave it to my brother, and he went off with it.”
Glamour:
You’ve become a role model for many girls—black girls in particular. Who were your role models, growing up?
LN:
“Oprah played a big role in my understanding of what it meant to be female and to really step into your own power. I wouldn’t even call her a role model; she was literally a reference point. You have the dictionary, you have the Bible, you have Oprah.”
GLAMOUR:
In more than eight decades of the Academy Awards, only seven black women have won an acting Oscar. What was your reaction to being one of them?
LN:
It’s exciting and humbling.
GLAMOUR:
To most people that would be the height of success. What does success represent to you?
LN:
For me it’s not just one thing. Every time I overcome an obstacle, it feels like success. Sometimes the biggest ones are in our head—the saboteurs that tell us we can’t. I’ve always had that going on: “I can’t,” and then I do, so the voice says, “Well, that was an exception!” It’s a tug-of-war between two voices: the one who knows she can and the one who’s scared she can’t.
