Is Hol­ly­wood fail­ing Lupi­ta Nyong’o?

Two years after win­ning the Oscar for Best Sup­port­ing Actress for 12 Years a Slave, Lupi­ta Nyong’o is nowhere to be seen. She’s still in movies, but has the curi­ous dis­tinc­tion of not actu­al­ly being ​‘in’ movies. For the sec­ond time in four months, she’s been con­fined to an entire­ly dig­i­tal per­for­mance – first as a CGI alien in Star Wars: The Force Awak­ens and now as a wolf in Jon Favreau’s The Jun­gle Book. By the time Nyong’o final­ly makes her live-action return this Sep­tem­ber in Mira Nair’s Queen of Katwe, it will have been near­ly two-and-a-half years since she was last on-screen.

Around the release of 12 Years a Slave, Nyong’o was that rarest thing in Hol­ly­wood – a non-white actress being excit­ed­ly pro­claimed The Next Big Thing. Awards sea­son has long act­ed as a sort of Tin­sel­town débu­tante ball, those strange, regres­sive cer­e­monies typ­i­cal­ly glimpsed in Tatler soci­ety pages. The likes of Jen­nifer Lawrence, Felic­i­ty Jones and Ali­cia Vikan­der all stem from here – young, beau­ti­ful, white women seem­ing­ly plucked from obscu­ri­ty and groomed for future star­dom, trailed by a flur­ry of fash­ion press, the pick of the hottest scripts, and effu­sive ego-mas­sag­ing cour­tesy of a high-pro­file male producer.

For a while, Nyong’o’s seemed to be on a sim­i­lar tra­jec­to­ry. She graced mag­a­zine cov­ers and reg­u­lar­ly appeared on best-dressed lists, and was quick­ly snapped up as a spokesper­son for Lancôme. ​“This is a great launch for her,” said her 12 Years a Slave co-star Alfre Woodard in 2013. ​“She’s not only very gift­ed as an actor, but she’s very intel­li­gent as a woman, she’s very beau­ti­ful, and she’s very African.” But Woodard put added empha­sis on her race when speak­ing of Nyong’o’s future, con­tin­u­ing, ​“If she was Cau­casian, we know she’d be set. We’ve been talk­ing about it for years, but we’ll be face to face with it and unable to deny it when she’s as tal­ent­ed, as beau­ti­ful, and as dark brown as she is. So we’ll see.”

Nyong’o has spo­ken of her delight at get­ting the oppor­tu­ni­ty to play com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed char­ac­ters, telling Buz­zfeed of the ​“lib­er­a­tion in being able to play in a medi­um where my body was not the thing in ques­tion.” But it feeds into a recur­ring trend in Nyong’o’s lat­est work. And when it comes to play­ing humans, she appears to only be in con­tention when the char­ac­ter is described as black on paper. In 2015’s South­paw, she wasn’t con­sid­ered for the role of Jake Gyllenhaal’s glam­orous wife, but rather that of an inner-city Detroit social work­er, a part that ulti­mate­ly went to Naomie Harris.

To strike a par­al­lel, Mar­got Rob­bie start­ed turn­ing heads dur­ing the same awards sea­son as Nyong’o. But while Rob­bie has rapid­ly climbed to the top of the Hol­ly­wood A‑list, play­ing every­thing from Harley Quinn to Tonya Hard­ing to Tarzan’s Jane, Nyong’o remains an elu­sive screen pres­ence. (It’s worth not­ing at this point that anoth­er immense­ly tal­ent­ed young black actress, Gugu Mbat­ha-Raw, is voic­ing a feath­er duster in Disney’s Beau­ty and the Beast update; Emma Wat­son is play­ing Belle.)

Of course, the lack of post-Oscar roles for non-white actors is noth­ing new. Tara­ji P Hen­son found her­self strug­gling for parts fol­low­ing her 2009 nom­i­na­tion for The Curi­ous Case of Ben­jamin But­ton – unlike her fel­low nom­i­nees. She told Uptown Mag­a­zine, ​“I used to have this crazy thing with Amy Adams, and I love Amy Adams. You see her [con­sis­tent­ly] get­ting nom­i­nat­ed, as she should, because Amy does good work. But, it’s like, ​‘Well, I did good work too.’” When asked why she chose a Tyler Per­ry pic­ture for her first post-Oscar project, she con­fessed that he was the only direc­tor that called.

Nyong’o is cur­rent­ly earn­ing raves on Broad­way, and since 2014 has been busy devel­op­ing an adap­ta­tion of Chi­ma­man­da Ngozi Adichie’s nov­el ​‘Amer­i­canah’. She’s also attached to Ava DuVernay’s upcom­ing sci-fi dra­ma Intel­li­gent Life. But there is a small, curi­ous aster­isk attached to her involve­ment: her char­ac­ter, once again, is an alien.

With her name appear­ing in the cred­its of two big stu­dio releas­es in such quick suc­ces­sion, it might seem like Nyong’o has man­aged to pass the vel­vet rope and suc­cess­ful­ly nab a spot in Hollywood’s VIP room. Take a clos­er look, how­ev­er, and it’s a room pop­u­lat­ed with elephants.