Lupita Nyong'o admits losing Kenyan accent 'felt like a betrayal'

Lupita Nyong'o has admitted that losing her Kenyan accent "felt like a betrayal".

The Oscar-winning actress has opened up about adopting an American accent to help her take on different roles in Hollywood.

Speaking on the latest episode of the What Now? With Trevor Noah podcast, Lupita explained that she struggled to switch between accents when she was in drama school.

"The first permission I gave myself to change my accent or allow my accent to transform was going to drama school," the 41-year-old said, via Entertainment Weekly. "I went to drama school because I didn't want to just be an instinctive actor. I wanted to understand my instrument."

The A Quiet Place: Day One star continued, "I wanted to know what I was good at, what I was not good at, and work on the things that I wasn't good at. And one of the things I wasn't good at was accents."

Lupita was born in Mexico City, Mexico, to Kenyan parents Anyang' Nyong'o and Dorothy Nyong'o.

The Black Panther actress went on to reveal that to improve her American accent, she decided not to "allow" herself to sound Kenyan.

"The process of deciding, 'OK, I'm going to start working on my American accent and I'm not going to allow myself to sound Kenyan,' so that I'm like monitoring and really trying to understand my mouth in a technical way to like make these new sounds," she explained.

However, the actress noted that losing her original accent made her feel like she was losing herself.

"Making those new sounds in a context that wasn't the classroom felt like betrayal," Lupita confessed, adding that she "didn't feel like (herself)" and often cried herself to sleep.