“I remember crouching around and I was using my hands as a gun, I remember that,” the Lupita Nyong’o recalled.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens is on track to break a ton of box office records on Friday, but one of the lead actresses didn’t even know what movie she was auditioning for when she went in to apply.
“It was crazy. I accepted this audition … and I didn’t really know what I was auditioning for. I knew I was going in for J.J. [Abrams], but I was so busy,” Lupita Nyong’o told Ellen DeGeneres.
“I was so busy I was working with adrenaline so I went in and out,” said the actress, who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her first feature film, “12 Years a Slave.” “I barely remember that audition and then two months later he called me.”
Nyong’o said she didn’t know the role was in Star Wars and had just been told that the director was “working on a big movie.”
“I remember crouching around and I was using my hands as a gun, I remember that,” the actress recalled.
Nyong’o only found out what role she had won when the director called her two months later. “I was in Morocco on holiday and he called me at my hotel and said, ‘I have this motion-capture role that I’m considering you for.’”
In the new Star Wars movie Nyong’o plays Pirate Queen Maz Kanata. “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,” she told DeGeneres.
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