NY Times has a chat with Africa’s big time television stars: Trevor Noah, host of the Daily Show and Actress, Lupita Nyong’o who has appeared on films like Star Wars: The Force Awakens, The Jungle Book, Eclipsed and 12 Years a Slave, which awarded her with an Academy Award for best supporting actress in 2014. The pair discussed various challenges of diversity, and their upcoming of growing in different worlds childhoods lived under oppressive governments.
Philip Galanes: Let’s start with #OscarsSoWhite, since we have the last actor of color to win one.
Trevor Noah: He makes you sound like an endangered species.
PG: Isn’t she? There hasn’t been an acting nominee of color in two years.
TN: But as a Hollywood outsider, can I say that asking, “Whose stories are being told?” is a cop-out. Look at the history that’s being taught. People of color have a limited berth in those stories. To a certain extent, we all went through the same thing.
PG: Enslavement?
Lupta Nyong’o: In a film like “12 Years a Slave,” race is of the utmost importance. But there are stories outside the race narrative that everyone can participate in. But we don’t. It’s about expanding our imagination about who can play the starry-eyed one.
TN: Exactly!
LN: We also have to ask ourselves what merits Oscar prestige. Often, they’re period stories. And for people of color, they end up being about slavery or civil rights. A blockbuster won’t do it. Do I have to be in a big Elizabethan gown?
TN: It’s always been a joke about the Oscars: If you want to win, lose weight, gain weight or get ugly, like Matthew McConaughey in “Dallas Buyers Club” or Charlize Theron in “Monster.”
LN: Those big leaps of courage.
PG: But even those films were based on true stories.
LN: “True” is a definite advantage.
TN: But also a limitation. We have to keep going back to Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. My question is: Can’t we remove “true story” and go for “amazing story”?
PG: But wouldn’t there still be barriers to diversity? I bet when Lupita told her theater producers that she wanted to do “Eclipsed,” a play about victimized women in Africa, no one yelled hurray.
LN: There’d been talk of bringing that play to New York since 2009, when I understudied in it at Yale. But Lynn Nottage’s play “Ruined” was on then. And there was a feeling that there wasn’t room for two plays about Africa and war to exist at the same time.
TN: God, that’s weird.
LN: I had never seen five African women on stage telling their story — ever! It’s so specific that it captures the universal. I was obstinate about doing it. And when the “12 Years” whirlwind hit, people started to approach me. And the Public Theater took me up on doing it.
PG: So powerful people — like Oscar winners — can make diversity.
LN: I’m hardly a powerful person.
PG: If you say so. This reminds me of the contretemps at “The Daily Show” before Jon Stewart left — about the lack of diversity on the writing staff. Have you been working on that?
TN: When it comes to diversifying, I had never realized how ingrained people’s mentality can be. It’s not even conscious. When I was looking for new people to try on the show, the network sent out all their tentacles. And people sent in audition tapes. And 95 percent of them were white and male. I was like: Does nobody else want to be a part of this show? Does nobody else even want a job?
PG: What did you do?
TN: I said, “I want more diversity.” And they said, “But this is what we’re getting.” So I said, “Then I will go out and look for it in the street.”
LN: However they were reaching out was not reaching into diverse communities.
TN: So I went to all the young comedians I knew — black, Hispanic, female, whatever — and I said, “Are you interested?” And they all said: “Are you crazy? Of course, I’m interested.” So I asked, “Why didn’t you audition?” And they said, “We didn’t know about it.” But they told me they’d sent it out to all the agents and managers. And they all went: “Oh, that’s where you made the mistake. We can’t get agents or managers.” We can say we want diversity, but there’s this little roadblock that no one tells you about.
LN: The gatekeepers.
TALKING ABOUT THEIR UPCOMING……
PG: Growing up under apartheid, were you in a big rush to tell the truth?
TN: Not really. We just love making people laugh. It’s an African thing: sitting around, talking as much trash as you can, getting people to laugh hard.
PG: But, Trevor, you had an extreme setup: a black mother and a white father who weren’t allowed to mix — legally.
TN: My story isn’t a pity story. It wasn’t a world of pity. We were in our lives.
LN: That’s the way you preserve your dignity.
TN: I thought I was lucky because I knew who my dad was. I knew kids who didn’t know their dad. True, I didn’t have access to him, but I knew how he felt. My mom was like: “Jesus didn’t have his dad, either. You have a stepdad.” People always make it seem like there’s one experience that’s the gold standard to aim for. I didn’t grow up that way.
LN: Neither did I. I think it came from watching TV from around the world. I knew there was my way and all the other ways.
TN: Did you ever see kids running upstairs in sitcoms and wonder what that was like?
LN: What I loved was when they walked in the front door and took off their coats. I loved those coats.
TN: Coats and stairs. I couldn’t believe a second floor was a real thing.
PG: You were born in Mexico, Lupita, while your family was in political exile. You all went back to Kenya when you were a baby. But was there a lingering fear?
LN: My parents shielded us from a lot. It would be dangerous for us to know things because then we could be a target. So they raised us with a semblance of normalcy. There were times when we were under house arrest and couldn’t go to school. I knew we were in a different situation than my friends.
PG: How did you just say that like it wasn’t a big deal?
LN: Even when things were out of sorts, my mother ran the house like always. You were in that bathtub at 6; you were in bed at 7. I remember my father being gone for long stretches when he was detained without trial. But I was optimistic enough to hold onto my mother’s saying, “He’ll be back.” I wasn’t allowed to lean into it.
TN: One of the best things I ever learned was boxing. My trainer kept drilling into me: “Understand that I’m going to hit you in the face. You can’t get angry about it because then you’ll stop thinking rationally. I’m not trying to hurt you; I’m trying to win.” It’s a fantastic mind game. You have to think.
LN: You can’t let your emotions get the better of you. And if you’re on a winning streak, the last thing you want to do is pat yourself on the back.
TN: Not too happy, not too sad.
PG: But you’re both describing a world where you control your emotions. How about when your feelings get hurt or you feel jealous?
TN: Then you work harder.
Correction: February 27, 2016
An earlier version of this article correctly quoted Lupita Nyong’o as saying, “I remember my father being gone for long stretches when he was under house arrest.” After it was published, Rebecca Sides Capellan, a publicist for Ms Nyong’o, contacted The Times to say that Ms. Nyong’o meant to say, “I remember my father being gone for long stretches when he was detained without trial.” And because of a transcription error, an earlier version of this article also misquoted Ms. Nyong’o in one place. She said that, as a child, she was called “black mamba,” not “whack mamba.”
SOURCE: NYTIMES
