Lupita Nyong’o gave Daniel Kaluuya advice on how to deal with fame.
The 28-year-old actor is continually receiving praise for his role in Jordan Peele’s directorial debut ‘Get Out’ and after starring in the thriller, Kaluuya landed a role opposite Nyong’o in the Marvel Cinematic Universe movie ‘Black Panther’, and she told him to "protect" himself.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Kaluuya said: "She said things have changed and that I’d need to protect myself and have my guard up. Now I’m seeing it as time goes on. Because I thought it’d be something that’d die down, but every time I go to America it builds and builds. Even now that it’s got the Oscar thing, it keeps on growing. So she just told me to protect myself – because I didn’t have a publicist or a manager. I just had an American agent. That’s it."
Now Kaluuya is going head-to-head against the likes of Gary Oldman, Daniel Day Lewis, Timothee Chalamet and Denzel Washington for the coveted Best Actor gong and he cannot believe it.
He said: "I did an indie horror! If I’d done a biopic then I could kind of understand, you could think, ‘That’s not that crazy’.
"But for an indie horror? And Denzel Washington! These people are like, what? I don’t know. It’s a blessing but you have to roll with the punches. It doesn’t even make sense. I think the film is up there, but the fact that this has happened, it’s genuinely surreal."
Kaluuya also admitted that he didn’t know what the reaction would be to ‘Get Out’ because "there’s never been anything like this".
He said: "I just knew that I’d never seen something like it before. I mean, the image of a young black man strangling a young white woman – it could go either way! So I just kind of kept going. I didn’t know what was going to happen, because there’s never been anything like this. And that’s the same with ‘Black Panther’, because there’s been nothing like it. I’ve got no idea."
Lupita Nyong’o told Daniel Kaluuya to protect himself
