Magazine Covers - Lupita Talks Acting, Fashion, Activism and Americanah on Vogue

Lupita Nyong'o has been in Hollywood just over a year, but sometimes it seems she's been there much longer. A new article in Vogue shows us Lupita's backstory of interest in acting since she was a little girl and the hardwork and dedication to the craft that started over a decade ago.

Looking fabulous on the cover, Lupita goes on in the inside story to talk seriously about her family, and how she got the role of Patsey in 12 Years a Slave. She also confirmed she's dating Somali-born rapper K’naan, when she spoke about getting involved with him in African activism. An excerpt and more photos from the shoot below...

She keeps her private life just that. “The safest thing is when I’m indoors in my world,” she says, which for the moment is an apartment in Brooklyn. When she isn’t cooking at home (“I like to cook whole fish. And I make some mean salads”), she is enjoying the borough’s unpretentious restaurants and bars.


The complicated question of how to follow Lupita’s dream debut is one that has clearly been exercising the actress and her management, who recently confirmed that she will be providing the voice for Raksha in Disney’s live-action/CGI hybrid revisiting of The Jungle Book. The news that she’d also been cast alongside Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver, and Game of Thrones star Gwendoline Christie in J. J. Abrams’s Star Wars: Episode VII, out Christmas 2015, meanwhile, sent the Internet into a collective frenzy. “

In the meantime, she says, “I’m really hungry to get back onstage. It flexes muscles that you need to do the more subtle film work.” She is particularly keen on the writing of the actor-playwright Danai Gurira and loves her plays Eclipsed, about the Liberian civil war, and The Convert, set in southern Africa, about the birth of Christianity on the continent. Like her boyfriend, K’naan, she is very engaged by the myriad issues confronting their homelands.

She recently signed on to both coproduce—in partnership with Brad Pitt’s Plan B and two other partners—and star in an adaptation of Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s acclaimed novel about the African immigrant experience, Americanah. “The book blew me away,” she tells me. “This was a project I wanted to work on, and I pursued it with all my being. It’s an unabashedly romantic book, really inspiring and uplifting. I found myself in her pages.”