At the 2014 Academy Awards it was Lupita Nyong'o who stole our hearts. The actress wafted while she walked, as she swirled her Nairobi blue custom silk Prada gown as she made her way down the red carpet. As if winning the red carpet race wasn't enough, the Kenyan actress went home with the Best Supporting Actress gong. Lupita has now landed a major campaign with Lancome and opened up to WWD about what it's really like to win an Oscar.
What went through her mind when they called out her name? “It was ‘Did I say my name or did they say my name?’” Nyong’o said in an interview with WWD. “All that time from ‘The nominees are…’ to ‘The Academy Award goes to…’ is years! It’s just way too long. And then your head is just filled with your own name, because that’s all you can think of — either they are going to say my name or they aren’t going to say my name. It’s a suspension of time, and the only thing that matters is ‘Are they going to call my name?’ Then they said my name, and my brother was screaming and losing his mind.'
[Getty]
When asked how winning has changed her life so far she said: "I was dazed and confused and I still am. It doesn’t feel real. I couldn’t believe I was climbing up the very same stairs that Jennifer Lawrence was climbing. It’s still very surreal. It’s changed a lot — more people know who I am, for example, and I’m sure it’s bound to change [other] things.” She added: “I’m sure it will at some point, but right now I’m just too exhausted. It does have a psychological affect. But at the end of the day, the perceiver affects the perceived. So how people regard me will obviously change how I regard myself. Right now, it’s too soon. I feel like the Oscars really did happen yesterday. I don’t have enough time between the event and my reality to really fully analyse how it has changed me.”
Lupita Nyong'o makes sure she is surrounded by her family as she said: “The thing about working in Hollywood is that it isn’t really a geographic location where you go and figure out the culture. Hollywood is really just made up of a whole bunch of people making movies everywhere. So it’s still a learning process; I cannot say that I’ve fully integrated into the ways of Hollywood — but I don’t know very many people who could say [they have] anyway. In my version, the Hollywood that I live in is very much peopled by people I’ve known from before. I carried my family through this entire process, and they made it more manageable.”
[Getty]
So what lies ahead for Lupita? She hopes to move back behind the camera as she said: “I’m interested in producing and perhaps directing [more] documentaries. My interest in directing fiction is” — she held up her hand, showing almost no distance between her thumb and her index finger — “about that much. I’m interested in discovering the drama in real life. That’s where you get inspiration for the fake ones.”