Voice performances aren’t typically considered for general acting awards—but after watching The Wild Robot, one might hope for an exception. The gorgeous, box-office-leading DreamWorks original, helmed by Chris Sanders, stars Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o as Roz, a robot on a future earth who’s left shipwrecked on an uninhabited island. Nyong’o’s joyously silly initial approach to the robot-out-of-water tale turns deeply moving as Roz takes on a maternal role for a newly orphaned gosling (voiced by Kit Conner), learning to raise and protect him in a dog-eat-dog world.
It’s a showcase of the skills Nyong’o has demonstrated again and again in front of the camera—whether in searing dramas (12 Years a Slave), spine-tingling horrors (Us), or badass superhero flicks (Black Panther). But as Nyong’o discusses candidly on this week’s Little Gold Men (read or listen below), her journey to this moment hasn’t been easy. After winning an Oscar a decade ago for her debut feature film role in 12 Years a Slave, Nyong’o was thrown to the Hollywood wolves—and left to navigate an industry that preferred to keep her in a small box.
Between The Wild Robot and this spring’s A Quiet Place: Day One, which earned similarly strong reviews while opening big in theaters, Nyong’o has proved that playing by your own rules pays off. Even, as she admits, when you’re figuring them out as you go.
Vanity Fair: Were you concerned about stepping into a big, animated studio movie like this—one where you have a director telling you what to do, and you’re just seemingly there to say your lines?
Lupita Nyong’o: I shared that concern. I didn’t just want to have a job where I just go in, do my thing, and leave. So in those first preliminary stages before I signed on, I had a number of different conversations with Chris Sanders, the director. I wanted to gauge how he felt about my contributions as an actor. The script still had a ways to go; you’re really signing on to a promise and hoping that it will be fulfilled. It was important for me to get on the same page with him as to what his vision for the final product was.
For me, what was so valuable about Peter Brown’s book was the core message of kindness being a survival tactic and a superpower, and the earnestness with which the story unfolds. It’s unabashedly earnest and sweet. I feel like we tend to shy away from that when reaching for sophistication, but earnestness is an important thing. I didn’t want to lose that and he didn’t either.
Can you talk a little bit more about that message, what you connected to in it?
It’s such a beautiful message for the real world, where we are often confronted by the foreign and the alien, and we are often afraid of it. There’s this fear of annihilation, that message that if we change, we die. It’s not always true. Sometimes change is inevitable and ought to be welcome. Also, change is additive. You get to adapt—and the adaptation is not necessarily an automatic annihilation.
Do you generally have a different conception of what a voice performance requires?
The character work is the same. You definitely have to get to know your character as you would any other character, but because it’s just voice, you’re working within the limitations of that. You have to convey so much more vocally and consider it as the active tool. It’s exciting to have those kinds of challenges. You find a lot of freedom in those kinds of limitations. The other difference is, unlike live action—where you’re working on a scene or two a day—when you’re doing a vocal performance, you have to be ready to touch on any part of the script at any given time. So in that sense, it’s somewhere between theater and film.
