Lupita Nyong'o: interview with a rising star What follows is an unsparing account of every facet of a slave's life. Those who do not die from beatings, illness or even grief (mothers are regularly separated from their children) toil day after day, while enduring physical and mental abuse. It is while Northup is under the ownership of the psychotic Edwin Epps (played by Michael Fassbender) that he meets Patsey. Although Northup remains the film's heart and centre, Patsey's story is its most harrowing arc. Buoyant and sweet-natured with lightning-fast fingers -most cotton-pickers average 200lb a day; Patsey always manages 500lb - she is caught between the dangerous, lecherous Epps and his jealous wife (Sarah Paulson). Raped and flogged regularly by the former, Patsey is in constant risk of her life, and consequently she suffers more than any of the other slaves. Nyong'o gives a remarkable performance, underlining Patsey's lightness and sense of pride. "There's a line [in Northup's book] where he says, "There was an air of loftiness in her movement, that neither labour, nor weariness, nor punishment could destroy,"" Nyong'o says. Which makes the truth - Patsey is as disposable as an animal - all the more harrowing. In one of the film's most traumatic scenes she is stripped naked and has her wrists and feet tied firmly to a stake before being beaten into unconsciousness, all because she wants some soap. "Mistress don't give me none and I smell so bad it makes me gag," she tells Epps. We see the crack and thump of the whip cutting into her flesh, while Nyong'o"s widening eyes express all the horror, betrayal and suffering. Lupita Nyong'o with Michael Fassbender (Edwin Epps) and Chiwetel Ejiofor (Solomon Northup) in 12 Years a Slave. Photo: Francois Duhamel I meet Nyong'o in a hotel in London in October. Accompanied by her American PR, she looks more Hollywood star than I had expected. She is wearing fabulous Christian Louboutin heels and a powder-pink Moschino coat with a chocolate-coloured collar. She is tiny (her mother, Dorothy, said recently that her daughter's height was something the family like to tease her about), and she has a carefree, laughter-loving air. She speaks warmly of Steve McQueen (whose previous credits include Shame and Hunger), calling him "incredibly inspiring - he observes, he notices things, very small things about you." She says that his audition was almost a relief after the "unconventional" first one she had in Los Angeles at the end of April last year with the casting director Francine Maisler. "She asked me to kneel down and then she would yell at me like a drill sergeant, "Start from there! Go back! Start from the beginning! I would start off at one level of despair and from there it was all downhill. Then she would start me off again at that lowest point and demand I go even lower. Her second audition was with McQueen himself, and he called to offer her the part the next day when she was back at Yale, about to "go and bask in the sun." "My knees gave way and I sat on the pavement," she says, laughing. It was so crazy. "Lupita just shone through," McQueen has commented. When I met her I thought, that's her. She has this vulnerability to her, but she is also a tremendous force. Nyong'o was born in Mexico (she is the second of six children; the youngest is 19, the oldest 33) where her father, the Kenyan politician Peter Anyang" Nyong'o, was a visiting lecturer in political science, and the family moved back to Kenya a year later when he was appointed a professor at the University of Nairobi. Lupita lived "a very middle-class life" in the quiet suburbs and gated communities of Nairobi. "I loved make-believe," she says. I was the child in the cupboard playing with my Barbies. When she was eight or nine she watched The Color Purple, the film adaptation of Alice Walker's novel. "It was first time I'd seen someone like me on screen," Nyong'o says. Whoopi Goldberg had my kind of hair and was dark like me. I thought, maybe I could do this for a living. Instead, aged 19, Nyong'o chose to pursue filmmaking, and applied to Hampshire College, Massachusetts, to read film and theatre studies. "I wanted to be an actor but I wasn't ready to admit it yet," she explains, "so my plan B was filmmaking and that felt more acceptable [than acting] for people in my community." As well as her nomination for Best Supporting Actress at the Golden Globes, Nyong'o has also been nominated for Best Supporting Actress and for the EE Rising Star Award for the forthcoming Baftas. Photo: Lydia Goldblatt In 2009 she wrote, directed and produced In My Genes, a documentary about the treatment of Kenya's albino population, but plan A was still very much in her thoughts. "I love filmmaking," she says, "but I decided to go to drama school because I thought that when I'm 60 and looking back on my life, if acting hadn't been a part of it, I would hate myself." She was offered her first acting job just before she moved back to the States to enrol on the three-year Master of Fine Arts course at Yale School of Drama. "A month before my departure I was at a party and a friend of mine said, "I am helping to scout for actors for this Kenyan TV show called Shuga. Do you know any? I was like, er, yes! Me! In this drama series set in the bars and clubs of Nairobi, Nyong'o played an exuberant twenty­something with a tendency to one-night stands. While exhilarating, to be cast in a major role in 12 Years a Slave before even graduating was also daunting. "I was very intimidated," she admits. "Every day I thought the phone was going to ring and it was going to be Steve saying, "I'm sorry, I made a mistake."" And then she would remember the reaction of her father - solid, successful, suspicious of acting's vagaries. My parents had been very worried about what I was going to do. When she called him with the news that she was going to be in a film with Brad Pitt, his only comment was, "Oh, so you have a job!" "That put things into perspective," she says. It was a job, and the intimidation of doing it with all these people had to be put aside. With six weeks before filming began Nyong'o threw herself into research. She got the greatest insight into Patsey from Northup's book, where, unlike the film, you are given her backstory: her father was a slave from Guinea, sold to the Eppses when she was a child; she was considered a favourite who lived in the house, and was fed milk and biscuits, but was sent out into the fields when Edwin Epps's interest became sexual. "So it's not just a master/slave relationship, it's kind of a parent/daughter relationship," she says. And you also have Stockholm syndrome, where you are traumatically bonded to the people who cause you the most harm. Every day is a kind of confusion - where did the love go? She also visited the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum in Baltimore. "The first thing I saw when I walked in the door was a 500lb bale of cotton," she says, "and it was taller than me, thicker than me, wider than me, and I was just met with the loftiness of Patsey." One of the most shocking things she learnt was that it was common to make accessories out of the skin of slaves that died. There were wallets and bags, and they were prized possessions. "It doesn't get more horrific than that," she says. "I was stunned that I hadn't even heard the name Solomon Northup," she continues. In school we learnt about slavery but we spent more time learning about the Holocaust. Fassbender, director Steve McQueen, Ejiofor and Nyong'o on the set of 12 Years a Slave. It was her idea to have Patsey making corn dolls during what little free time she had. I felt she was robbed of her childhood and I wanted to find ways of capturing that sensibility. Steve loved the idea and I learnt how to make the dolls, and made one almost every day. It was a therapeutic thing for Patsey, a way to stay in the zone, a part of her that couldn't be enslaved. She admits that her intense empathy with Patsey took its toll. Patsey kept me awake at night from the day Steve called me, to the day I left the set and then for some days after that. Not that she stayed in character between takes. To do that would be to go crazy. Michael and I had this ritual of "making nice" before and after scenes. We wouldn't say anything to each other, just a look in the eye and a grasping of hands. Our characters are in such opposition but we as actors needed each other in order to be able to go the distance. There was one night in particular when Nyong'o experienced Patsey in extremis. She went to bed with a criss-cross of prosthetic welts on her back in preparation for fresh ones to be added for the next day's scene. "I could only sleep on my stomach and I was so uncomfortable and haunted by these "wounds,"" she says. I realised my night of discomfort was temporary. Hers was permanent. It broke my heart realising how she had zero choice. All she ever wanted was to be released through death and she didn't even get that. On finishing 12 Years a Slave, Nyong'o moved to Brooklyn, where she "resides" - "home is where my family is" - and says she likes cooking. I'm pretty awesome at making salad dressings. Her next film is Non-Stop, a terrorist thriller, with Liam Neeson and Julianne Moore. She recently watched 12 Years a Slave on the big screen for the first time and was shocked by her reaction. "I was a wreck," she says. But it was cathartic. I was overwhelmed because there was such a shared, unspoken determination to make this film and it's clear when you watch it. 12 Years a Slave is out now