Lupita Nyong’o said she gifted herself a 10-day silent retreat in celebration of her March 1 birthday last year, shortly after her record-breaking “Black Panther” hit theaters.
The actress, who played Nakia in the culturally important superhero film, termed going on the silent break in Texas both “hard” and “the best gift.”
“It was the best gift because, the thing is, my job has two main parts,” she said in an interview with Marie Claire magazine. “There’s the acting, and there’s the celebrity. And the celebrity involves a lot of giving.”
She continued, “Our lives are so full of distractions; you go from one distraction to another.”
The Oscar-winning actress told the magazine that she was “constantly wanting to leave” the retreat but dared herself to “take one more hour and another hour.”
She called the experience both “crazy and beautiful.”
In her interview, Nyong’o also shared her excitement in working with writer-director Jordan Peele on the soon-to-be-released horror movie “Us.” The actress said after meeting Peele, she proclaimed, “I will hold the boom for you. I will drag cable. I’ll do it all and anything.”
“I knew I had to work with him,” she said, adding that the Academy Award-winning director asked her about her process as an actress upon meeting her.
The first trailer for “Us,” starring Winston Duke alongside Nyong’o, was released in December. A new trailer for the film, which is set to hit theaters March 22, dropped this week.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly in December, Peele said he found it important to have a “black family in the center” of his new movie. He won an Oscar last year for his psychological horror film about racism, “Get Out.”
Nyong’o joined her “Black Panther” cast at the annual Screen Actors Guild Awards last month for a history-making night. The film won a SAG award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture, becoming the first superhero film to win the honor.
After leaving her silent retreat last year, the actress told Marie Claire that she listened to Kendrick Lamar’s album “Damn,” on her flight back to New York.
″I heard every word Kendrick Lamar said,” she said. “I heard the musicality. I heard instruments I’d never heard before. It was like clarity. And I was just, like, wow.”
Read Nyong’o’s full profile in Marie Claire here.