“Can you do big things from such a small place?”
This is the question that Phiona Mutesi (played by newcomer Madina Nalwanga) asks her mother, Harriet (Oscar®-winner Lupita Nyong’o), in Disney’s new feature Queen of Katwe, which tells the true story of a young girl from the streets of Kampala, Uganda, whose world opens up and changes rapidly through the game of chess. Katwe is a small place and it’s a difficult place—one of Kampala’s most poverty-stricken slums—where Phiona and her family spend their days selling vegetables, struggling to get by. Robert Katende (Golden Globe nominee David Oyelowo) runs a chess program for Katwe children, who he counsels, “Use your minds and you will all find safety.” Phiona quickly takes to the game that makes it possible for the smallest of pawns to become the most formidable of queens, but while she can see eight moves ahead in a chess match, she finds it more challenging to figure out where she actually belongs in the world.
When actress Lupita Nyong’o first read the film’s screenplay, she found herself in tears just 10 pages into the script and she made up her mind to play Harriet, a proud and strong-willed mother of four at the tender age of 30 years old. “I was moved by the characters who I found on the page,” Nyong’o tells D23. “The fact that this was a story that centered on a little girl trying to just navigate her world. But [I was moved by] Harriet as a character—this woman who sees the world very differently from how I see the world—a woman who’s afraid of dreams and suspicious of them, and has had so much strife in her life that has brought her to this point.”
It’s Harriet, Nyong’o believes, who instilled Phiona with such grit. “She is working with the tools that life has given her,” Nyong’o says, acknowledging that Harriet’s self-preservation and independence were “radical” for women in Katwe. But while Robert Katende and chess are a catalyst for Phiona, Nyong’o believes that timing is key. She points out, “What Phiona has that Harriet doesn’t is her youth. The rules have not been set for Phiona, and I think that’s why this is such an important story, because Robert Katende comes to her at a time when she’s still highly impressionable and has not yet decided what life is all about. So she’s able to be more daring.”
Nyong’o compares the real-life Harriet and her seemingly unending reservoir of strength to a baobab tree. “It’s a tree that grows in semi-arid conditions that has a very thick trunk,” she observes. “They preserve themselves in very extreme climatic conditions, and that’s Harriet. There’s something guarded about her, something enigmatic and watchful, and I wanted to honor that in my performance of her.”
The time that Nyong’o spent with the real-life Phiona was equally valuable. “I saw Katwe through Phiona’s eyes,” Nyong’o says of a tour that she was given by Phiona and Robert Katende, a tour that included the places where Phiona and Harriet took shelter at times when they were homeless and the places where they’d lived. “That’s a memory that I’ll hold dear to me for a very long time,” she says.
Nyong’o confesses that she had to “unlearn” chess for the role of Harriet, and she laughs about being defeated by a 6-year-old in her most recent game. “I can’t really claim any skill at it,” she jokes. But Nyong’o had what she describes as the “incredible” opportunity to receive a chess lesson from Robert Katende, and affirms, “He has a way of making chess feel so vital to life.”
Though she’d recently appeared in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (as Maz Kanata) alongside screen icon Harrison Ford, Nyong’o admits that she was a little nervous about working with the young actors in Queen of Katwe. “There’s an added responsibility because, of course, you become more than just the leader of yourself—you have to lead the pack,” she explains, but those jitters quickly gave way to inspiration. “They were so absorbent and curious and excited to learn, and children just don’t have to pretend. They go at the imaginative work with such truthfulness and that was so refreshing,” she says.
In addition to Queen of Katwe and Star Wars: The Force Awakens, this year Lupita also lent her voice to mother wolf Raksha in Disney’s live-action/photorealistic feature The Jungle Book. She’ll be entering the Marvel Cinematic Universe when she appears in Marvel’s Black Panther, slated for release in 2018. Nyong’o is in the unique position of having acted in films that touch just about every part of Disney, and she credits the Company for the way it inspires children in a lasting way.
“I think Disney is a studio that is keenly interested in sparking the imagination of children in particular. Disney movies are the ones you remember from your childhood,” Nyong’o says, sharing that her earliest Disney memory is watching Mickey Mouse and the magic brooms of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” sequence in Fantasia. “[The films] touch you at a time when you’re highly impressionable and when your imagination is wild and alive and rich. In a sense, I guess they help to sustain that kind of wonder quality that we all need—always.”
Queen of Katwe opens in U.S. theaters in limited release on Friday, September 23, expanding wide September 30, 2016.
