For Lupita and Junior Nyong’o, ‘Twelfth Night’ Is Child’s Play, Revisited

About a year ago, Junior Nyong’o took a call from the director Saheem Ali. Nyong’o had recently graduated from drama school and Ali, an associate artistic director of the Public Theater and a family friend, had phoned to offer him a job.

Would he like to play Sebastian in a production of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” which would reopen the renovated Delacorte Theater in Central Park? Nyong’o accepted immediately.

But he had one question. Sebastian is a twin. Who, Nyong’o asked, did Ali have in mind to play Viola, his sister?

“Meeeeeee!” said a woman who was suddenly on the line. He knew that voice — it belonged to his sister Lupita Nyong’o.

“I kind of freaked out,” Junior Nyong’o recalled. He was speaking, calmly now, on an afternoon late last month, before a rehearsal for “Twelfth Night,” which is in previews and opens on Aug. 21. Brother and sister were seated on a sofa in a downstairs lobby at the Public’s rehearsal space, in matching haircuts — shaved on the sides and lightened at the tips. She wore a small star as a pendant. He wore a large one.

The two weren’t often in rehearsal together. The structure of “Twelfth Night” keeps the twins apart until an emotional reunion at the play’s end. A few days earlier, I had watched them rehearse that scene. With Ali standing by, they worked out the blocking.

“I want to hold your face. How do you feel about that?” Junior Nyong’o asked his sister.

She answered: “I like it. But I want to hold your face.”

Later, Lupita Nyong’o would tell me that she struggled to imagine how it would feel to attach herself to a stranger as her twin. She was relieved that she didn’t have to. On the couch, she held her brother’s hand. “I don’t need to do any of that work,” she said. “Because the bond is built.”

“I wanted him to be my son!” his sister added. She also admitted to some light bullying, in concert with her younger sisters. “We tortured him with tickles,” she said.

Unique among their siblings, she and her brother shared a love for imaginative play. “He really enjoyed make-believe as much as I did,” Lupita Nyong’o said. “I could like play with him and he would take it seriously.”

Each was introduced to the theater early. Their father had acted in some Shakespeare plays as a student and would often recite lines from them. When Lupita Nyong’o was 14, she starred in a local production of “Romeo and Juliet,” which is how she met Ali, who is also Kenyan. He played Romeo’s friend Mercutio. Still, her parents didn’t necessarily encourage a career in performance, so it wasn’t until after college that she announced a plan to pursue acting.

Her brother did plays throughout school, sometimes as a glorified extra, sometimes as the star. (At boarding school, he played Jesus in “Godspell.”) An accomplished saxophone player, he had planned to study music, but a summer program changed his mind. “I loved music too much to suffer for it, whereas I could suffer for acting,” he said.

Lupita Nyong’o went on to the graduate acting program at Yale. She won an Academy Award in 2014 for “12 Years a Slave,” made her Broadway debut in 2016 in Danai Gurira’s “Eclipsed,” starred in the “Black Panther” movies and the horror film “Us.” Throughout, her brother was a frequent red carpet date. Eventually, he matriculated at the University of California, San Diego, graduating in 2023 with a master's degree in acting.

Childhood play aside, the siblings could not recall ever having acted opposite each other. Then Ali, who had reconnected with Lupita Nyong’o when she was at Yale and he was a master’s student at Columbia, made his pitch. During the pandemic Ali had collaborated with her on a bilingual audio version of “Romeo and Juliet,” which had left him longing for a chance to work together in person. His dream, he told her, was to have her play Viola in “Twelfth Night,” with Junior Nyong’o as her twin.

“These were performers who had something they were going to bring to the production that was special,” he explained in a recent phone call. “An emotional truth that you can aspire toward or aim to cultivate, they have that for free.” She agreed, then they plotted the prank call that wasn’t actually a prank. Their casting also allowed Ali to translate some of the lines into Swahili, which all three speak. (Luo and English are the siblings’ mother tongues.) In the play, Sebastian and Viola are accidental immigrants, shipwrecked on a foreign coast. The language marks their difference. It also unites them.

“What it does, it returns us home,” Junior Nyong’o said. “It’s an anchoring of identity.”

Still, Lupita Nyong’o was nervous. She worried that in the rehearsal room she would relate to her brother more as a sibling than a peer, that she would be overprotective, hold him too tight. “Because he’s a full-grown man, but he’s still a baby brother!” she said. Before rehearsals began, they had dinner together, laying the groundwork for their collaboration. Together they set intentions and expectations, promising never to take the other for granted.

“Twelfth Night” held particular weight for each of them. Lupita Nyong’o had watched and rewatched a VHS recording of the play as a kid, drawn to its comedy and melancholy. “It’s so funny and it’s so sad and that oscillation makes it so memorable, so resonant,” she said. It remains her favorite Shakespeare play. Her brother had acted in it twice before, and in one of those previous productions, playing a waiting woman, he had styled his physicality after his sister. “We took a photo when I was in my costume and we looked like twins,” he recalled.

To play twins this time, they are relying on more than DNA and shared history. They talk through the play on their subway rides to and from the Public. (They live near each other in Brooklyn.) Each observed the other in rehearsal so that they might share some gestures and habits. In the course of the play, Viola disguises herself as a boy. At one point, she is mistaken for her twin and he for her. For these scenes, Lupita Nyong’o modeled her performance on her brother. “He’s a dude for free,” she said, laughing. “It’s amazing how easily his mannerisms come to me because I’ve observed them from when he was zero years old.”

There were a few physical alterations. A wig had been suggested, but instead Lupita Nyong’o cut and styled her hair like her brother’s. (“A wig at the Delacorte in August? No,” she said.) She joked that she would do her best to grow six inches, but she made no promises. Really, she wouldn’t need to. “I think people knowing we are siblings will help with the emotional commitment to the characters,” she said.

Rehearsal has taught them more about their characters and more about each other, as people and as performers. They discovered a shared love for textual analysis and a similar generosity toward the other actors in the room. Junior Nyong’o told his sister that he admires her curiosity, her persistence. She replied that she loves seeing him hold his own against seasoned actors such as Sandra Oh, who plays Olivia.

Their family connection has mostly been a boon. Lupita Nyong’o regrets it only in the opening scene, when Viola believes that her brother has drowned and she has to imagine that. (I saw this scene. Even in rehearsal, it was wrenching.) “It would be much easier if he wasn’t related, but that’s a disadvantage I’m welcoming of because it just makes it deeper,” Lupita Nyong’o said.

And for the scene when they find each other again, there are no deficits. “It’s the most heartfelt moment in the entire play,” Ali said. He had long known Lupita Nyong’o’s capacity for emotion. “Now I get to watch Junior, for the first time, meet and match his sister in such a beautiful way,” Ali said.

I saw that, too, in rehearsal. Preparing for their scene, Lupita Nyong’o did a quick yoga routine. Her brother took off his vest to better match her look — white tops, dark bottoms, impeccable sneaker game. They did the scene, crying at the reunion.

Lupita Nyong’o stretched out her arms and shook her head. “We cannot be playing the pain,” she said. So they decided they would play the joy instead. They embraced, separating in a complicated secret handshake. Then they took the scene again.