The cover of Vogue is a big deal, and Lupita Nyong’o has now scored her second in as many years. The October issue features the actress, who talks a little about The Force Awakens – and J.J. Abrams himself sheds a little light on what they were looking for in the role:
While we tuck into delicious platters of fish, sorbets, and cheeses, Lupita tells me that she has just spent four months filming a CGI character—a pirate named Maz Kanata—for J. J. Abrams’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens, opening this December. “We needed a powerful actress to play a powerful character,” the director explains to me later. “Lupita was someone I’d known a little and was enormously fond of. More important, her performance in 12 Years a Slave blew my mind, and I was vaguely desperate to work with her.”
Acting a motion-capture character was “really bizarre and lots of fun,” Lupita says. “I really enjoyed the fact that you’re not governed by your physical presence in that kind of work. You can be a dragon. You can be anything.”
Again, it’s very Vogue, but she also talks about her life in Kenya and America. She answers a few more Star Wars questions on video:
(Pineapple!)