Lupita Nyong'o may join Star Wars’ esteemed lineage of five or so female characters

By Sean O'Neal | March 17, 2014 | 5:18pm

Aux Features Film

Amid the determining of which promising young male actor he would like to sentence to a lifetime of fan conventions and Internet seething, to be alleviated by the occasional mediocre thriller and nights of staring morosely at their face on a licensed bed sheet, J.J. Abrams is also said to be looking at Lupita Nyong’o. This is not unusual—lots of people are currently looking at Lupita Nyong’o—but Abrams’ interest in the 12 Years A Slave star is purely professional, as he considers whether the Oscar-winning, Yale School of Drama-trained actress whose family survived brutal torture in Kenya has the talent and understanding of hardship necessary to participate in a space battle.

The Hollywood Reporter says Nyong’o met with Abrams a few weeks before she took home the Academy Award, possibly for the part of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s daughter or granddaughter—a role that was previously described as a “twentysomething female who is either of mixed race or black,” and which brings up the question of why Obi-Wan could listen to millions of voices crying out from a distant planet, but couldn’t be bothered to call his kid, apparently. It’s also just one of many roles that Nyong’o is being considered for, as she herself must weigh whether she should follow her meteoric rise by joining a movie universe that has had approximately five female characters with actual names, and one of them was Aunt Beru.