AUSTIN, Tex. — When she was around 11, Lupita Nyong’o’s parents brought home a cassette tape that changed her life. It was of the song “Regulate” by the West Coast hip-hop dynasts Warren G and Nate Dogg. Nyong’o and her five siblings, then living in a suburb of Nairobi, could only partially savor the lyrics of the song — a hearty, slang-ridden narrative of a thwarted mugging, topped with a soupçon of ceremonial group sex. But the music was hypnotic and evocative, suggesting an absorbing pocket universe. Nyong’o remembers wearing the tape out, rewinding it over and over until she knew all of the words by heart.

Of the many apparently effortless but difficult-to-emulate things the 36-year-old star of “Us,” the new psychological horror film from Jordan Peele, has done in front of a camera, it’s worth taking a moment to consider the rapping. She’s done it twice, both times in videos filmed in the back seat of a car and posted on Instagram: the first to celebrate her three millionth follower and the second with her “Black Panther” co-star Letitia Wright, on the week of the film’s premiere.

No one would call Nyong’o the next Warren G, but something about watching her rap disturbs an inner accountant. Here is a person whose very first appearance in a feature film, as the unforgettable Patsey in “12 Years a Slave” (2013), made her the seventh black woman and first black African to win an Academy Award for acting; a person whose doll-like facial symmetry and frictionless skin has landed her four solo appearances on the cover of Vogue; a person who speaks four languages and holds a graduate degree from Yale.

And this same person, wearing dark sunglasses and facetiously calling herself Troublemaker, reveals that she also can rap, with appropriate levels of insouciance and conviction, and while remaining on beat. One suspects the divine dealer of dereliction of duty.