For the next episode of the Awards Tour Podcast, our host Jacqueline Coley chats with Academy Award winner Lupita Nyong’o, who stars in the upcoming sci-fi animated film The Wild Robot. The story centers on Roz, an orphaned robot on a wild planet where she is forced to adapt and perhaps discover the humanity within her circuitry and resist the orders she was given. Out in the wild, she learns more about community and develops an appreciation of the vibrant, beautiful world she explores and the incredible beings that inhabit it. In our episode, Lupita tells Jacqueline how she found the voice of Roz, how she likes to choose her projects (including her upcoming podcast “Mind Your Own”), as well as the one genre of film she would like to explore in the future.
Jacqueline Coley for Rotten Tomatoes: What brought you to the world of The Wild Robot? I think it’s the first “grand” animation you’ve done.
Lupita Nyong’o: They approached me to play Roz, and I read the source material, Peter Brown’s book by the same name, and I was really impressed by it and inspired. It moved me. I don’t like to read, (laughs) but I couldn’t put it down. And it’s a very classic story. I thought maybe it was a lost classic from the twenties. And then I found out it came out in 2016, and I was like, “Wow.” It’s so hard to tell a story that feels timeless and futuristic at the same time, and it achieves that. And at the heart of it is a beautiful message about the power of kindness, which I think is just a wonderful thing to meditate on at any point.
RT: What would you say was the hardest challenge with this one? Was it the fact that she’s a robot? It’s not like you had an expressive avatar. It’s a robotic face.
Nyong’o: Yeah. That was a limitation. And then Roz is a robot, and robots don’t feel. I was really adamant about making sure that we’re not falling into the easy trap of just emoting. And that’s what I do as an actor. That’s my job to emote. So it started off as an intellectual question: “How am I going to portray this character in a way that is compelling but doesn’t fall into this betrayal of her circumstances?”
What we kind of determined is that Roz’s strength is that she adapts and mimics. And so, through the power of mimicry, she takes on characteristics from the animals she meets. So she starts off with a very programmed, optimistic voice that is quite two-dimensional, and that’s her factory settings. And then subtly, as she grows and adapts to this environment, she takes on these new textures in her voice. And finally, there’s a more well-rounded three-dimensional sound closer to my own.
Watch the video for the full interview with Lupita Nyong’o.
The Wild Robot
(2024)
hits theaters on September 27, 2024.
