LUPITA NYONG’O OPENS UP ABOUT VOCAL CORD POLYP THAT SILENCED HER FOR 3 MONTHS

Lupita Nyong’o stopped by Sherri Show to discuss her upcoming animated feature, The Wild Robot, revealing the extreme physical toll the role took on her body including a complete loss of her voice for three months.

While promoting the DreamWorks Animation film, Nyong’o explained that the process of finding the voice for her character, a robot named Roz, led to an unexpected medical issue. “When Roz starts off, she’s in a very Siri- and Alexa-inspired voice, which is optimistic, relentlessly so, and very different from how I speak,” Nyong’o told Shepherd. “I did it for one too many hours, and I developed a polyp on my vocal cords.”

The diagnosis forced the Oscar-winning actress into a strict period of silence. “I couldn’t talk for three months,” she revealed. Nyong’o admitted that navigating daily life without speaking led to some awkward encounters with strangers. 

“Sometimes people were insulted by me. I had a few people curse me out because I didn’t speak back,” she said. To solve the problem, she had a solution. “I actually made a little tag that said, ‘I am on vocal rest.’ When people did that, I would just point to the tag. Like, I’m not trying to be rude, I’m just unwell.“

The actress was only permitted to speak using what she described as a “bedroom voice.” “My doctor said that in order to cure myself, I couldn’t use my voice at its full capacity, and I couldn’t whisper either, because whispering is very dangerous,” Nyong’o explained. “All I could do was speak in a bedroom voice. I had to speak like that the whole time.“

During the interview, Nyong’o also discussed the unique nature of working on an animated film versus live-action. Because voice acting is often recorded in isolation, she revealed that the Toronto International Film Festival premiere was the first time she met many of her co-stars in person.

“It was a little awkward. It’s like the first day of school,” she admitted. “We’ve done this really intimate thing together, but we’ve never hung out together as a cast, which I really take for granted when I’m working on live action.”

While the event felt like a blind date with the cast, it did serve as a reunion with her Star Wars co-star Mark Hamill. However, Nyong’o confessed she had no idea which character he had voiced in The Wild Robot until she heard the final cut. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, he’s the bear.‘”