During an international press tour, every minute of a celebrity’s time is accounted for. Their schedules are jam-packed with interviews, red carpet events and roundtable Q&As. Journalists vie for access, for five more minutes, for just one extra question. To get an hour-long interview for a celebrity profile is a luxury, to get double that over two interviews is unheard of. Lupita Nyong’o isn’t your average celebrity, and this isn’t your average interview.
We first meet – over Zoom, because it’s 2024 – on a Wednesday afternoon in Los Angeles. It’s early in the morning in Australia. Normally, I would be anxiously reading over my questions and crunching the numbers to make sure I have enough time to get through them all. But this isn’t normal, remember.
Today, I’m not asking the questions. “It’s like we’re on a speed date,” explains Nyong’o, who wants to get to know me before we sit down for her cover interview. As speed dates go, Nyong’o is quite the match. She’s intelligent, thoughtful and engaged. She listens deeply and takes a real interest. She asks me about my favourite stories, my interview style and my sister’s PhD. I’m not used to sitting in the hot seat, but Nyong’o puts me at ease. I can’t help but open up to her. If she wasn’t an Oscar-winning actor with an impressive list of films under her belt, she’d make one hell of a journalist.
A week after our “speed date”, we sit down for the main course. It’s a Friday night in LA and Nyong’o is spending it with me. “I would [normally] be hanging out with my cat or my friends,” she says when I ask her what a typical Friday night looks like in her world.
It’s small talk, and Nyong’o doesn’t do small talk. Let’s get down to business. We’re here to discuss her latest blockbuster film, A Quiet Place: Day One. The third instalment in John Krasinski’s highly-acclaimed, post-apocalyptic franchise takes us back to the beginning, to the day alien predators invaded New York, destroying those who dare to make a sound. The city that never sleeps is plunged into silence.
Nyong’o plays Samira, a young woman who gets caught up in the NYC chaos with her cat. Krasinski sought her out for the role.
“I learned that John wanted to talk to me through a mutual friend. She texted me, ‘Can I give him your number?’ And I said, ‘Uh, yeah, give him my number.’ When we met, he told me about the story and their interest in me and I was really humbled. Maybe it’s delusional of me but it still surprises me when people have me in mind. It’s such a validation coming from someone of his talent to want to pass the baton on to me. I feel deeply honoured. It’s like he’s handing me his baby and I’ve got to take care of it. There is a high sense of responsibility to do our darnedest to keep the train on the tracks.”
Nyong’o, 41, who was born in Mexico City, grew up in Kenya and graduated from the Yale School of Drama in 2012, isn’t the only one steering the Quiet Place succession. She stars alongside British actor Joseph Quinn of Stranger Things fame. “We’re an odd pairing,” admits Nyong’o. “My first impression of Joe was, ‘Wow, this guy means business.’ He has a similar work ethic to me, where he is in service to the character and there’s no ego.”
Watching footage of the actors together, you can feel the chemistry between them. But it’s more than that: there’s an unspoken trust between the pair. Nyong’o describes their artistic relationship as “robust, beautiful and wonderful”. “I can remember one scene where I was having trouble with my memory, and the director Michael [Sarnoski] came over to give us [me and Joe] a series of physical walking directions. By the time he got to the end, I could not remember the beginning. I started to panic. My memory was betraying me, and Joe did this really sweet thing where he repeated the directions under his breath, as though to himself. He was doing it for me, but I knew he also didn’t want to embarrass me by helping me outright. I was in tears because of how sweet he was to me in that moment,” Nyong’o remembers with a smile.
She’s speaking to me from a sun-drenched room in her home in LA, where she recently moved from New York, and where she lives with her rescue cat, Yoyo. Quinn wasn’t the only close relationship she formed on the set of A Quiet Place: Day One. Working with one of the on-screen cats, Schnitzel, who plays Frodo, was a revelatory experience. It wasn’t love at first sight, however. It was fear at first mention.
“I was deathly afraid of cats before I made this movie. Since I was little, I’d had bad luck with cats, and I was very suspicious of them. I really believed they were bad omens and I spent my life avoiding them. Having a cat around could bring me to tears,” says Nyong’o, who went so far as to ask the director if he would consider using an armadillo instead.
“They organised for me to do cat therapy, where I was introduced to some cats over a number of days. Slowly I got to the point where I could touch the cat with one finger and eventually run my hand down its back. Then I could successfully hold the cat without freaking out.”
By the end of filming, Nyong’o was madly in love with Schnitzel and wept when she had to say goodbye to him. The experience inspired her to foster a cat of her own.
In late October, Nyong’o was in the depths of darkness and despair. At the time, she shared on Instagram that her relationship had come to an end, posting: “I find myself in a season of heartbreak because of a love suddenly and devastatingly extinguished by deception.”
She explains, “I had just experienced a devastating heartbreak and a voice said to me, ‘Get a cat.’ I told one of my best friends, who’d flown in to my rescue, and the very next day she had lined up visits to shelters and adoption centres.”
She vividly remembers the sign on the wall at the LA Best Friends Pet Adoption Center: Not over your ex? Foster a cat. “It was literally a sign. I was not confident that I knew how to keep a cat alive or take care of it, but then I saw the sign.”
Initially, Nyong’o was set to foster Yoyo for two weeks. After two days she knew, “This cat is going absolutely nowhere. He immediately started exposing his belly and was so comfortable. It was love, love, love from the very beginning. I swear to God, I credit him for keeping my heart supple. It could have dried all the way up and shut down.” It’s true what they say, we don’t rescue pets. They rescue us.
Read the full story in the August issue of marie claire on sale Thursday July 18.
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