So fantastic.
You look great.
It's good to see you again.
It's good to see you.
Thank you for having me.
So what a big year.
I mean, you had Black Panther, now you have Us.
I mean, you couldn't get bigger.
I mean, you're doing two amazing movies.
Yeah.
I feel very lucky.
Yeah.
Really cool.
All right, so we're going to talk about Us in a minute
because the audience saw it last night.
Oh, you did?
Yeah.
[APPLAUSE]
So and happy belated birthday.
When was your birthday?
March 1st.
OK.
And so what did you do?
Well, I had a laser tag birthday party.
Oh.
Yeah, in Brooklyn.
That's safer than paintball thing because that's hurts.
Yeah.
Yeah, it does hurt.
So I got about 30 of my friends together,
and we went and played laser tag.
I learned a lot about my friends, you know?
I learned who I want in a time of war on my side.
That sounds fun.
Yeah, it was a lot of fun.
That sounds fun.
I heard you did something interesting last year.
What did you do?
I went on a 10-day meditation retreat.
Oh, wow.
Where?
Yeah.
It was outside of Dallas.
It's a [INAUDIBLE] retreat.
I don't know where it was, it was like farmland.
You go there and you sign away your electronics
and you promise to stay the 10 days.
And it was the hardest thing I have done.
Really?
Aside from us, yeah.
Do you speak?
Or you don't speak?
No, it's complete silence for 10 days.
You're allowed to ask questions at specific times of day.
But you're not allowed to make eye contact
with the other people on the retreat
because the idea is for you to have a solitary experience
and really just face your own demons.
So all that silence, no electronics, no music, no TV,
nothing.
Just you and your thoughts.
And, boy, did I learn a lot about my thoughts.
Yeah.
That's amazing.
Yeah, silence is a really powerful thing.
I believe in that.
So how many people were there?
I want to say, we must have been about 70.
I mean, you can't really count because you can't look at them.
No, you can't look at them.
You just do down, there's three people over there.
I can sense about 70 people around me.
Right.
OK.
Yeah.
That's really cool.
And at the end did you get to look at people
and then kind of learn about them?
Well, you know it was funny, right before we started,
before the silence is official, some woman came up to me
and she was like, "Are you Lupita Nyong'o?"
And I was like, oh, damn.
I came all this way to get away from that.
Right.
And then afterwards she came up to me and said, "You know,
I'm so sorry.
I realized after this 10 days that that was the one thing you
were probably escaping from."
And I appreciated that.
Yeah.
She was probably the whole 10 days going, "God, I'm an idiot.
Why did I do that?"
[LAUGHTER]
The whole time, just by herself, "Oh, she's going to hate me."
But I'm going to go up to her at the end
and I'm going to say-- that's all she had going on.
[LAUGHTER]
All right, so let's talk about Us.
It looks so good.
So tell me and everybody that hasn't seen what it's about.
Well, it's a nightmare from Jordan Peel's mind.
And it is about Adelaide Wilson, a woman who is riddled with
this trauma from her childhood that she cannot explain.
And she is on vacation with her family in their summer
home in Santa Cruz, and she's convinced
that something bad is going to happen.
And she's proven right, when these four shadowy figures
show up at the top of their driveway.
And their worst nightmare ensues.
[LAUGHTER]
And you play two different characters.
Yes.
Very, very different characters.
That must have been fun.
It was incredible.
I mean, it was hard work.
Yes.
Ooh, it was hard work.
Because they're very different, they
are diametrically opposed to each other,
but they are also connected.
So I had to go to some dark places within myself
to find the doppelganger, Red, do a crazy voice, that
was a lot of fun to create.
And, yeah, I enjoyed the experience.
I spent a lot of time between takes sleeping,
just trying to catch up with myself.
Yeah.
Because when you have a day off the other character doesn't.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And you never meet your scene partner.
Yeah.
Which is a challenge of its own.
Yeah, that's really difficult. So you're talking to someone,
sort of.
Yeah, someone who's just an eyeline and sometimes just
a green cross on the wall.
That's really hard.
Yeah.
All right, so we're going to take a break.
I just am fascinated by that meditation thing, though.
I want to talk to you more about, though.
Oh, yeah sure.
All right, so we'll take a break.
We'll kind of come back and play a game.