My immediate family was always very supportive. It was my own fear of the rest of the world not accepting me, the rest of our society not accepting my wish to be an actor.
Lupita Nyong'ORead
I give myself homework when I have an audition. I give myself goals, and that's how I check how I'm doing. It can be something simple like 'listen,' or 'find your feet.' And then afterward it's an assessment, so in a way it's not about booking the job or not. It's about what I learned as an actor about that character.
Interpretation
The quote expresses the importance of self-assessment and learning in the process of acting.
In this quote, Lupita Nyong'o emphasizes the significance of personal goals and self-reflection in the acting process. Rather than solely focusing on the outcome of securing a role, she underscores the value of the experiences gained and lessons learned from each audition, suggesting that growth and understanding as an artist are paramount.
In practice
During a workshop for aspiring actors, I could use this quote to emphasize the importance of learning from experiences rather than just focusing on success.
My immediate family was always very supportive. It was my own fear of the rest of the world not accepting me, the rest of our society not accepting my wish to be an actor.
[My mother] always said I was beautiful and I finally believed her at some point.
What is fundamentally beautiful is compassion: for yourself and for those around you.
That you will feel the validation of your external beauty but also get to the deeper business of being beautiful inside. There is no shade in that beauty.
As human beings, we aren't as individual as we'd like to believe we are. And I think that's what makes acting possible. Despite the fact that I have not experienced something, I have it in my human capacity to imagine it and to put myself in someone else's shoes, and to take someone else's circumstances personally.
I've loved the opportunity to learn about the fashion world and appreciate it as an art form, and I look forward to my continued education, but I never want it to take over my acting.
When you do one more 'Cinderella' or whatever, what is there to learn? Every part in the repertoire has a good side and a bad side, and the more often you do the same ballet, the more often the bad side comes out. If you want to give dance life, you must give it fresh food, not keep going back to the garbage to look for old scraps.
When I'm working, I'm so narrowly focused on sound, language, rhythm, flow, that I rarely feel the emotion of the text. It's only after - long after - I've finished a piece that I can experience in any way its emotional charge.
Music is an intrinsic part of life; therefore, it is important to transport different forms of artistic expression, science, and mathematics into compositions.
As long as the world continues to be strange and interesting, I still want to take pictures of it.
It's true that misunderstanding and lack of understanding are often themes in my fiction, but I am grateful for the moments when true understanding is achieved, especially between writer and reader. It's miraculous.
Once, when we were playing at the Apollo Theater, Holiday was working a block away at the Harlem Opera House. Some of us went over between shows to catch her, and afterwards we went backstage. I did something then, and I still don't know if it was the right thing to do—I asked her for her autograph.
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