After landing a role to feature in the recently announced cast of StarWars, Episode VII, Lupita Nyong’o has optioned rights for the film version of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s best-selling novel Americanah.

The Nigerian author confirmed the news during an interview with the UK based Stylist Magazine Book Club last week.

“Lupita was a very early fan of Americanah and so before she was sort of well-known in the way that she is now, she wrote me the loveliest email, a very long and passionate email about Americanah”, Adichie said during the interview.

The 12 Years A Slave break-out star was first rumoured to feature in AMERICANAH’s film adaptation in March when Adichie, who was speaking to Arise Entertainment 360 about the recent successes of black actors in Hollywood, hinted that Lupita was going to make an announcement soon.

“I’m going to do the mysterious thing and say that Lupita might be making an announcement very soon. I don’t know. That announcement might be about Americanah”, she said.

LUPITA – PRODUCER AND ACTOR

Following this achievement, it’s now official that Lupita will actually be producing the film and not just being ‘considered for the lead role’ as it had been first believed but again, she might just take the role, who knows.

In a nutshell, “Americanah” tells the story of a smart, strong-willed Nigerian woman named Ifemelu, who leaves Africa to chase the ‘American dream’. The book was selected as one of the 10 Best Books of 2013 by the editors of the New York Times Book Review and it won The 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award (Fiction). It’s Adichie’s second book to be adapted for the silver screen after Half of a Yellow Sun which was released recently.

IN MY GENES

Lupita is not new to film making and she has several crew credits under her name. In 2009, she directed a feature-length documentary titled In My Genes.

In My Genes, follows eight individual Kenyans who have one thing in common: they were born with albinism, a genetic condition that causes a lack of pigmentation. What is it like to be ‘white’ in a ‘black’ society? It reveals the uplifting life story of Agnes, a woman with albinism of few means who heads a household of 7 children, her 17-year-old daughter expecting another. During the course of the documentary, Agnes discovers she has skin cancer and finds out the real reason why she lost both of her eyes. Yet Agnes keeps going, trusting in the work of her hands and the strength of her God. The threads of the woolen baskets she weaves blindly hold her family together as she tells us her story.

The documentary has won two awards so far; Best Documentary, Five College Film Festival, Northampton, 2008, and Souvenir Selection, Africala Film Festival, Mexico City, 2008

NONSTOP

Lupita has recently graced our screens after 12 Years A slave in the new Hollywood action thriller, Nonstop, where she stars as a flight attendant in an international plane that gets hijacked 40,000 feet above the air. She doesn’t have an outstanding role as she did in 12 years a slave but for an actor, every credit counts.