During her Oscars acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actress, Lupita Nyong'o gave a shout-out to 'The Wilsons'. We were totally convinced that they're a family or something, and in a way they sort of are: turns out 'The Wilsons' is a nickname for the acting class at Yale University.
Some genius tracked down a whole bunch of her classmates and teachers on the MA Acting course from 2011-2012 and asked them what they thought about Lupita, who broke all of our hearts playing Patsey in 12 Years A Slave. Clue: they like her a* lot*.
(If you're a cynic and get fed up of reading people gush over one another, especially Lupita, just pretend these people are talking about you, not her.)
'All of the Yale School of Drama social media community just lost it,' when Lupita got the statuette, said Max Gordon Moore, who co-starred with her in a Yale production of *The Taming of the Shrew, *toldThe Daily Beast. 'We must have crashed 30 servers on Facebook and Twitter. It was intense. I think it would happen just out of school pride, but [it’s] also Lupita—everyone likes her. She gives you a lot to like. She just welcomes it.'
So what's Lupita like, we hear you ask Moore? 'She’s delightful. She really is as nice as she looks. She’s a very good actress but that’s not acting. She’s very gracious and really, really generous with people.' Evidence of this comes via one of her birthday parties: she invited classmates to an African bar in Brooklyn, and instead of accepting presents, handed out presents - glasses with pictures of beautiful women on them - to her pals. Wowsers. That's like, beyond nice.
'As an actor it makes me feel very good about the industry because you want to believe that it values not only talent and beauty but that it values uniqueness,' Moore says. 'And Lupita is unique, very unique. There’s no one else like her.'
This guy isn't alone in his appreciation of the Kenyan-born actress. Ron Van Lieu, the Chair of the Acting Program at Yale, also said she is 'at the top of the category of what I would call the "innately gifted". The audition that sticks in my memory was Juliet from Romeo and Juliet. It seemed to me that in spite of her lack of previous training she had an intuitive gift for language,' he remembers. 'She worked from a completely truthful base. She was fascinating to watch. That is an unteachable thing. That I just want to keep watching you and keep watching you, and keep watching you.'
And there's more. 'Everything that she approaches, she has that kind of wonder and excitement,' says another acting classmate, Lileana Blain-Cruz (ps - these names! So Yale!) 'Without being condescending about it, it’s almost childlike. That’s wonderful because everything is new and fresh and exciting. There’s no jadedness about her.'
For fear of turning Lupita into a momentary figure of repeated, intesne adoration and therefore inevitably heading her way for a backlash (see: Jennifer Lawrence) we're just going to nod and smile at all of this. Very cheering, yes. But let's not get too carried away, right? We all know how luvvies can be.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
Picture: PA
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.