With Us, the new psychological thriller from Jordan Peele (Get Out), Oscar winner, Lupita Nyong’o marks her most prominent role yet.
Here, the star of 12 Years a Slave, Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Black Panther takes centre stage as Adelaide Wilson, a headstrong wife and mother of two whose idyllic summer holiday becomes a fight for survival when a spectral family of doppelgängers – led by her own personal double ‘Red’ – arrive at the family’s front door.
Marking her screen debut with an Oscar-winning turn in 12 Years a Slave, Lupita Nyong’o has since donned a mo-cap suit to create the intergalactic smuggler, Maz Kanata, in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, gave Raksha her voice in The Jungle Book, and most recently starred as Wakandan warrior, Nakia, in the breakout Marvel blockbuster, Black Panther.
Nyong’o sat down with press in Los Angeles to discuss the making of her latest film, Us. These are excerpts from that conversation.
What was it that first attracted you to Us?
Lupita Nyong’o: I first got interested in working with [US director] Jordan Peele after I watched Get Out five times in one month. I loved it so much. I loved how much he trusted his audience to see the layers and to unpack them. I loved how he gave us a cultural event that we could take with us. I loved how he trusted us to come to our own conclusions about the film and respected the conclusions we came to. I loved the humour, the social/political commentary of it. It was just really smart and I was like, I have to work with this director one day. Unbeknownst to me, he wanted to work with me too and so when I received the script, I was already primed to say yes.
What was your initial reaction when you read it?
Lupita Nyong’o: Actually, it was totally different from Get Out. Terrifying to read and really intriguing – the two characters that he was offering me to play. I loved the idea of playing two characters and investigating this notion of us sometimes being our own worst enemy.
Did you tap into any of your own demons to play the character’s doppelganger?
Lupita Nyong’o: I don’t think we can play anything that doesn’t already exist in us. With this I had to really dig into the darkest parts of myself and allow them to come to the fore.
How did you go about creating Red’s distinctive voice?
Lupita Nyong’o: In the script it said that Red hadn’t used her voice for a very long time and so I was inspired by this condition called spasmodic dysphonia, which is a condition that is brought about by a trauma, either an emotional trauma or a physical trauma. What happens is your vocal cords involuntarily spasm, creating this irregular flow of air. I had heard someone speaking with that condition and it actually opened the gateway for me to build Red’s voice. I worked with a vocal therapist on how to do that without damaging my own voice, and then I built from that. I did it for Jordan [Peele, Director] about a week before we started filming and thankfully he liked it.
What was it like working with Jordan Peele? Did it live up to your expectations?
Lupita Nyong’o: It was beyond my expectations. From my first meeting with Jordan, I could tell that he was a man of compassion. I met him shortly after Get Out came out, and I had just wrapped Black Panther. When we spoke he asked me, “What do you need from me? What is your process?” A director had never asked me that before and I could tell in that question that he understood how vulnerable an actor has to get in order to take on someone else’s story. Being a performer himself, he got that and he was interested in meeting you where you were most comfortable.
What was it like working with Winston Duke again? You have quite a long history…
Lupita Nyong’o: We went to [Yale] drama school together. We never worked together in school, but I did see his work for the two years that we were there together, and obviously he saw my work as well and then we worked together on Black Panther. It was a small scene, just one so this was the time that we were honest to god screen partners. But it was so easy, because we know each other, we trust each other, we’re friends and we have the same training. There was that shorthand.
The film is also, at times, disarmingly humorous. How important was it to have levity in a film like this?
Lupita Nyong’o: I think that’s one of Jordan’s strengths. That he understands the thin line between comedy and horror and can exercise the duality in those moments. Both laughter and fear are involuntary reactions that comedy and horror elicit from an audience. He’s mastered this way of building the tension and then just letting it out a little in a comedic moment before building it back up again. I think that’s what makes his films such a giddy experience.
US releases on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-Ray, DVD and On Demand on July 29 2019
(Interview edited for length.)
