Lupita Nyong’o on Cementing Her Scream Queen Status with ‘A Quiet Place: Day One’ and the Advice She Gave Joseph Quinn About Joining the MCU
The (silent) Scream Queen has emerged.
Following Lupita Nyong’o’s role as a tethered clone with a shaky voice in Jordan Peele’s 2018 film “Us,” the Academy Award-winning actor now gets completely silent for “A Quiet Place: Day One,” set in a world where if you make noise, you’ll suffer a brutal death by aliens.
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“This genre helps us exercise emotions that we are otherwise running away from a lot of the time, we don’t get permission to be openly scared in our real life,” Nyong’o told Variety at the film’s premiere in New York City on Wednesday night. “I found myself coming [back] again and again to horror because of the roles that have been offered to me there. There is a heightened nature to horror that makes for a really interesting character to explore.”
“A Quiet Place: Day One” takes place in New York City — ironically one of the loudest cities in the world. It’s the third movie in the franchise and a prequel to John Krasinski’s “A Quiet Place” and “A Quiet Place Part II,” following Nyongo’s character Samira on the first day of the deadly alien invasion. Krasinski was on hand for the premiere at AMC Lincoln Square, posing for photographers alongside Nyong’o, her co-stars Joseph Quinn, Djimon Hounsou and Alex Wolff, and filmmaker Michael Sarnoski (“Pig”) to whom he handed over the directing reins.
“[Krasinski] knew that he wanted to bring a fresh voice to the universe, and he didn’t want someone to try and make it feel like the other movies. He said, ‘Make it your movie. Follow the characters you want to follow and make it tonally feel like something that you believe in,” Sarnoski said. “That was a huge weight off my back, to feel like I didn’t have to try and match something from previous films.”
The film Krasinski and Michael Bay both served as producers on the film and were both in attendance to lend their support for Sarnoski.
“They were they were both so sweet and so supportive of it, and they gave me some beautiful congratulations,” Sarnoski said. “It’s really fun talking to someone like Michael Bay, who you think of as making these huge movies and is untouchable. Then he’s pointing out these like subtleties of the movie and lens choices. He was very sweet and intelligent about the way he approached that stuff.”
Krasinski and Bay weren’t the only ones dishing out advice to their colleagues. Nyong’o shared some words of wisdom with Quinn about joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe. She played Nakia in Marvel’s “Black Panther” movies, while Quinn is set to star as Johnny Storm (aka the Human Torch) in “The Fantastic Four,” which is scheduled to begin filming later this year.
“She told me that it was an experience that I could very much look forward to…” Quinn began, getting briefly distracted by Nyong’o’s shimmering arrival to the black carpet. (“Doesn’t she look gorgeous?” he remarked, interrupting himself.) “She told me to be open-minded and just to commit very hard.”
It’s just the first of many Marvel connections for Quinn, who also stars in Paramount’s upcoming “Gladiator 2,” the trailer for which is rumored to debut attached to Marvel’s “Deadpool & Wolverine.”
“I haven’t seen a cut of it,” teased Quinn, who plays Emperor Caracalla in Ridley Scott’s Roman epic. “I’ve seen little moments of footage, and it looks like everything that you could possibly want. It’s paying homage to the first film, but very much making it’s its own thing. There’s some fantastic performances in it. And I’m very much looking forward to people seeing it — if not a little nervous about it.”
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