AceShowbiz - Lupita Nyong'o, who was born in Mexico but raised in Kenya, revealed the emotional and technical challenges she faced while trying to adapt to an American accent. Her reflections were shared during a candid interview on the "What Now? With Trevor Noah" podcast.

"The first permission I gave myself to change my accent or allow my accent to transform was going to drama school," Nyong'o said. "I went to drama school because I didn't want to just be an instinctive actor. I wanted to understand my instrument."

She recalls her time at the Yale School of Drama as crucial in identifying her strengths and weaknesses as an actress. "I wanted to know what I was good at, what I was not good at, and work on the things that I wasn't good at. And one of the things I wasn't good at was accents," she shared.

The transformation, however, was not an easy one. The actress described the experience as feeling like a betrayal to her true self.

"The process of deciding, 'OK, I'm going to start working on my American accent and I'm not going to allow myself to sound Kenyan,' so that I'm like monitoring and really trying to understand my mouth in a technical way to make these new sounds. Making those new sounds in a context that wasn't the classroom felt like betrayal," she confessed. "You know, I didn't feel like myself and I cried many nights to sleep…many, many nights."

Nyong'o's journey to Hollywood stardom began with her Oscar-winning role as the enslaved Patsey in Steve McQueen's "12 Years a Slave." This breakthrough opened the door to significant roles in major franchises such as "Star Wars," where she played Maz Kanata via performance-capture, and "Black Panther," in which she starred as Nakia.

Most recently, Lupita lent her voice to the animated family adventure "The Wild Robot," and appeared in "A Quiet Place: Day One." Despite her successful career, her story serves as a poignant reminder of the sacrifices actors often make in the pursuit of their dreams.