Lupita Nyong’o has opened up about her experience filming A Quiet Place: Day One, and how “therapeutic” the experience was for her.
In the film, Nyong’o portrays Sam a cancer-stricken woman who is trying to survive the first day of an alien invasion. Playing a character with cancer was a form of catharsis for Nyong’o, who in 2020 experienced heartbreak and tragedy when her Black Panther co-star Chadwick Boseman died of colon cancer.
Speaking to PEOPLE magazine, Nyong’o said the role was “scary to have to go there”, especially for a character who “is really facing their mortality, even before this apocalypse takes place, and whose life is slipping between her fingers.”
“That was daunting to have to go there, psychologically and emotionally,” she said. “In the end, it was actually very therapeutic because I had just experienced not too many years ago the death of Chadwick Boseman, which shook me to my core. I definitely was thinking about that a lot.”
“What I came to realize is that it’s really important to be reminded of our mortality, because then we live life just a little more intentionally,” she went on to add. “When we think we have all the time in the world, we can really take people for granted and experiences for granted.”
Boseman passed away on August 28, 2020 from colon cancer aged 43. Despite being diagnosed with the illness in 2016, the actor had kept the diagnosis private. Some of the movies he starred in after his diagnosis include Captain America: Civil War, Marshall, 21 Bridges, Da 5 Bloods and Black Panther.
A Quiet Place: Day One scored a four-star review from Jordan Bassett, who wrote for NME: “It’s no Aliens or even Gremlins 2, which the film resembles in its relocation to the Big Apple, but nor is it Alien 3, a confused affair that betrayed a similarly laboured journey to the screen. Instead, Sarnoski has crafted a tonally cohesive but low-key drama that happens to be interspersed with moments of white-knuckle terror. Appropriately enough, A Quiet Place: Day One is more of an urgent whisper than a shout.”