When I ask her, “How do you act ‘anything’ ?,” she says, “My training at Yale is the core of the actor that I am. Before that I was just going on instinct . . . having my imagination take over. But Yale taught me that it’s about giving yourself permission to pretend.”

An important pretending trick is to dress in the same “uniform” every day while going to and from set. If she doesn’t have to think about what she’s wearing when she’s not in costume, this allows her to focus. When she was recently filming the Mira Nair–directed Queen of Katwe, the true story of a chess master raised in a Ugandan slum, she wore an A-line skirt and blouse every single day because that’s what her character wore. “One amazing thing about filming in Uganda was that on the first day of rehearsal we were all barefoot,” she remembers. “I looked down and all the feet were my complexion. That had not happened to me before. I was reminded that I’m actually not that special. There are lots of people in the world who look like me.”

Her love of Africa is at the heart of Lupita’s persona and her work. Given the suddenness of her celebrity, she took advice from colleagues about how to best use the platform she now has. The British actress Emma Thompson (whom she met on a panel in 2013) and her 12 Years a Slave costars Alfre Woodard (“a straight talker with an incredible sense of humor”) and Sarah Paulson (“I basically have her on speed dial”) have helped her navigate everything from career choices to activism. “Oprah Winfrey advised me to figure out what my intention is and to act on it,” she says. “I think I can make a difference by having certain stories be told. But it’s in the hope that I will not always be the only one telling them.”

On her recent visit home, Lupita was greeted with a ceremonial reception. “It was overwhelming,” she says. “In Africa there is a nationalism that comes with things like winning an Oscar. It’s traditional to be welcomed and celebrated. Praise songs, which are the highest honor in Kenya, were sung for me, and they included lines from my Oscar speech.” (“Your dreams are valid” featured prominently in the lyrics.) She chuckles as she recalls local newspaper coverage under a headline that read "Tears Roll Down Hollywood Cheeks."

lupita nyongo Photographed by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, Vogue, October 2015

“I wanted to go back to Kenya with something to say,” she continues. “I was raised with a strong sense of charity. When I was younger I volunteered with an orphanage. I did a lot of organizing of church events.” Her mother, who runs her own public-relations company, also raises money for cancer. Besides returning to Nairobi a WildAid ambassador, Lupita hosted mentoring events for groups of arts-focused school children aged between ten and eighteen. “When I was that age I would have liked someone to talk to me. Because what I found when I was growing up was that there was no real understanding of what it meant to be in a creative field.”