From the critically acclaimed 12 Years A Slave to the box office goldmine that is the Star Wars saga, Lupita Nyong’o has embraced a wide variety of experiences and roles

Indeed, such is the impact that her relatively new career has already had on popular culture that she has already been the subject of a Saturday Night Live sketch.

While the estimable Alec Baldwin and the sterling Kate McKinnon has been making political hay with the election of Donald Trump throughout 2017, SNL producer Lorne Michaels and his writing team threw together a mass of memorable sketches that had nothing to do with the race for the White House. The pick of these was ‘Actress Round Table’ which saw Hollywood’s finest and fairest address the position of women in the movie industry. Featuring show regular Cecily Strong as Marion Cotillard and special guest Margot Robbie as a corpsing Keira Knightley (“Everyone wants to cast you as the girlfriend, the mother, the beautiful girlfriend, the beautiful mother”), the skit’s effortlessly stolen by McKinnon whose grand dame Debette Goldry harkens back to the gold age of the Hollywood, a time when the casting couch was a sadly common way for women to land parts, actresses were frequently paid in brooches, and starlets unfortunate enough to fall pregnant found themselves locked in loveless marriages. The sketch also showcased Saturday Night Live cast member Sasheer Zamata as the Academy Award-winning star of 12 Years A Slave. The Goldry character may have constantly referred to her as ‘Little Peter No No’, but if you’re looking for proof of how far Nyong’o has come in next to no time, her ‘presence’ in a sketch like this is definitive.

Three years on from her Oscar success, Nyong’o is a bigger star still thanks to JJ Abrams casting her as Maz Kanata – a 1,000 year old space pirate-turnedlandlady – in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The nearest thing the final trilogy has to Yoda, Kanata’s also set to play a crucial role in The Last Jedi, the picture destined to become the biggest movie of 2017, this in spite of the fact it doesn’t open until mid-December.

Read the rest of this article on page 11 of the latest issue of Elite Living Africa.

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