Wednesday, September 4, 2019

The Inimitable Lupita Nyong’o

Who could be a more fitting cover subject for Vanity Fair’s October issue, featuring our annual Best-Dressed List, than Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o? The actor sat down with Kimberly Drew to talk about her career trajectory, her long-awaited TV adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah—“We’re so, so, so, so, so close to rolling the cameras,” Nyong’o swears—her sense of style, and how Hollywood has changed in the wake of the #MeToo movement. (Shortly after the first reports of Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sexual misconduct surfaced, Nyong’o wrote an op-ed for the New York Timesrecounting her own alleged encounter with the disgraced mogul; Weinstein has denied all allegations of nonconsensual acts.) “In the past, when it came to physical combat, there were always consultants on set, but when it came to intimacy there was never, ever somebody present to help actors navigate that. Now you have that, which I think is a great inclusion, and ensures that those kinds of abuses don’t happen,” Nyong’o told Drew. “I think there’s also at times an oversensitivity, which I just think is the nature of the pendulum shifting, and it takes time to find the balance. I’m quite happy that there is that kind of extreme change, and hopefully we find equilibrium as we move forward.”
Elsewhere in HWD, Greg Williams shoots the stars at the Venice International Film Festival; Richard Lawson and K. Austin Collins review two of the most anticipated titles at Venice and the Telluride Film Festival, Joker and Judy; and Joy Press catches up with Sacha Baron Cohen,who’s playing an uncharacteristically serious role in the upcoming Netflix series The Spy.