Lupita Nyong'o on 'Star Wars' Role: 'I Didn't Know What I Auditioning for'
Lupita Nyong’o had no idea she would be joining the Force when she first auditioned with the Star Wars: The Force Awakens director, J.J. Abrams.
“I didn’t really know what I was auditioning for. I knew I was going in for J.J., but I was so busy,” the 32-year-old star admitted during an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. “I was working with adrenaline so I went in and out. I barely remember that audition and then two months later he called me.”
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The Oscar winner shared revealed the only thing she actually remembered from her audition was “crouching around and I was using my hands as a gun.”
While on vacation in Morocco, Nyong’o got a call from the director and was hired for her first motion-capture role.
The actress went on to explain the processes of getting ready to be filmed for motion capture took an upwards to two and a half hours, which meant she couldn’t even take off the plastic dots used to put her expression on an avatar to eat.
“I had dots on my lips and on my teeth and then at lunch time I would just eat the dots and then they would put them back,” Nyong’o added, as DeGeneres expressed concern over her eating plastic. “I’m choosing my poison.”
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Although she might not recall auditioning for the role, she does remember her earliest Star Wars memory.
“My earliest Star Wars memory was being off of school in Kenya and curling up on a poof in my living room watching the movie,” she told ET at the Monday premiere of Star Wars: The Force Awakens in Hollywood, California. Watch the video below to see which character Abram admits was most fun to write.