Lupita Nyong’o, while undoubtedly radiant, talented, and on the rise, isn’t even in the same league as an established star, someone who has played the Hollywood game since before the birth of Twitter. Could Nyong’o land the cover of a glossy magazine tomorrow if she felt like it? Possibly; she’s already graced New York, W, Marie Claire, and Entertainment Weekly, to name just a few.
But could she command, say the $20 million that Angelina Jolie reportedly got for “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” — the same amount she’ll supposedly make if she stars in “Salt 2″? Or even the $10 million that contemporary Jennifer Lawrence won for “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire”?
Not necessarily.
What Nyong’o is isn’t an A-lister. Not yet, though you should check back with me in a year or two. No, Nyong’o is something very different, and, potentially, just as powerful, though in a different way. Nyong’o is an “It Girl.” And in that regard, she may very well have risen faster than any other It Girl in recent memory, having skyrocketed from nobody to media darling in the course of a single movie.
“She’s only been in the spotlight for a year,” veteran fashion publicist Cole Trider of Autumn Communications tells me. “That’s huge. As careers go, that rarely happens so quickly.”
In comparison, let’s look at old-school it girl Julia Roberts. Teens of the late 1980s liked her early performances in small movies such as “Mystic Pizza.” But she’d worked in the film biz for about two years before breaking huge as the female lead opposite Richard Gere in “Pretty Woman.” After that movie debuted circa 1990, big, wavy, barely controllable hair became the rage.
Late ’90s it girl Gwyneth Paltrow spent even longer rising to the top of the publicity heap; she spent either five or seven years building her film resume, depending on whom you ask, before she became a household name. “Emma” was in 1996, the same year she scored her first Vogue cover; “Shakespeare in Love,” the film that won her an Oscar nomination and the chance to wear the terribly tailored, and yet somehow historic, Pink Ralph Lauren Gown Seen Round the World, debuted in 1998.
Plum Sykes of Vogue called that Oscar night Paltrow’s “Grace Kelly” moment, but, really, it was her debut as a fashion It Girl.
“Her Grace Kelly moment, when she won Best Actress for ‘Shakespeare in Love’ at the 1999 Oscars in Ralph Lauren’s pink princess dress, transported her from starlet to icon,” Sykes recalled in a hard-to-find 2002 homage.
“Afterward, I kept seeing that dress everywhere, BCBG knockoffs or whatever,” Paltrow told Sykes at the time. “And I was like, ‘I hate that dress! I can’t stand that dress!’ Now when I see that dress I die for it. I think it’s so beautiful.”
Even the aforementioned Lawrence didn’t shoot to the top of the fashion-and-lady-mag game right out of the gate a la Nyong’o. After two years in movies, Lawrence landed her first Oscar nomination for “Winter’s Bone, wearing Calvin Klein to the ceremony. It was a nice dress. Some people liked it. But Calvin Klein is certainly no Dior, which reportedly is paying Lawrence a pretty $15 million for an extended three-year endorsement gig.
As for why Nyong’o was able to shoot to the absolute top so quickly, Trider credits several factors. Nyong’o, unlike some of her contemporaries, genuinely cared about fashion from the get-go. It doesn’t hurt that Nyong’o also happens to be a bona fide Stunner. But the biggest factor may be one big, very lucky, meeting, with a stylist named Micaela Erlanger. Vanity Fair has called Erlanger the “woman behind the star,” and it may be right.
Nyong’o met Erlanger through Michelle Dockery, another stylista, while the two were shooting the film “Nonstop.”
“She and Lupita were talking, and Lupita said, ‘I have this film coming out, “12 Years a Slave,” and I need a stylist,’” Trider explains. “The first major red carpet Lupita and Micaela did together was for the Toronto Film Festival… and after that, it was like, boom.”
Boom indeed.
