Lupita Nyong’o was one of the tens of women that accused Hollywood exec, Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault in 2017, and as she covers the latest edition of The Hollywood Reporter, the award-winning actress opens up on why she chose to speak up against the erstwhile big shot.
See excerpts from her interview and more photos of her being pure magic below.
On speaking up against Weinstein: “I felt uncomfortable in my silence, and I wanted to liberate myself from it and contribute to the discussion,” she says. “That was just what I felt I needed to do, quite viscerally. I couldn’t sleep. I needed to get it out.” Over several days, she wrote and wrote, alone with her computer, then showed what she had crafted to her mother. “I had to talk to her about it because it was something that we hadn’t talked about,” she continues. “She was really moved and very supportive.”
On learning to accept that she sometimes feels insecure about her looks: “That’s OK,” she says, with a sly smile, “because it will keep me grounded. I don’t need to be so full of myself that I feel I am without flaw. I can feel beautiful and imperfect at the same time. I have a healthy relationship with my aesthetic insecurities.”
On coming to America for her studies: “It was culturally shocking and culturally discombobulating,” she admits. At the university, “I was regarded with a fascination that was weird: I had grown up watching Americans on TV, so they were not as unfamiliar to me as I was to them, and that was something I had to negotiate. Hampshire can be very casual, and I was the kind of student that ironed my clothes the night before. But it was also a very liberating place because I learned that I was self-sufficient and self-driven, that I could set goals without someone flogging me.”
On being a mother someday: “I feel I was born to be a mother,” she says, though where she would raise her children, she doesn’t know. “Somewhere where there’s grass. Because I want my kids to be able to run around and discover things with their feet and their hands. I still love climbing trees. There’s no trees to climb here.”
