Lupita In The Lead

Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong’ o has mastered many a Genre, from historical drama to space opera to superhero film. This month, she faces her fears — and ours! — in Jordan Peele’s new horror movie, US.

- Veronica Chambers

LUPITA NYONG’ O shows up early for lunch at a waterfront restaurant in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Dressed in a belted coat, midnight-blue turtleneck, and plaid shawl jacket, her hair braided into a crown laced with a thin golden thread, she looks like a movie star but presents as the flawlessly chic friend you’ve known since your teens. As if you remember how gorgeous she was at the prom, but you also recall long nights throwing down on the dance floor and laughing till you cried. As we go back and forth about domestic affairs (“I would love to just be Martha Stewart and host and stuff, but I’m too shy to do that,” she says) and the elegance of having a piano in your living room, I find myself imagining the two of us in a Black Girl Magic version of Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion.

There’s something so still and enchanting about Nyong’o, 35, that you start imagining movie scenarios. Famously, when the actor sat next to Rihanna at a Miu Miu fashion show, Twitter took one photograph of the pair and dreamt up an entire narrative in which they were high-tech grifters. In their infinite hive-mind wisdom, the social-media-platform users went on to suggest that Ava DuVernay would be the perfect person to direct such a film and that Issa Rae would be, should be, the one to write it.