Black Panther actor Lupita Nyong’o had a feeling she’d see her reaction to Will Smith’s slap of host Chris Rock again and again after this year’s Academy Awards.
Lupita sat behind the actor and his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, during the ceremony when Smith smacked the comedian following a joke about his wife’s shaved head. In 2018, Pinkett Smith revealed she was diagnosed with alopecia areata, an autoimmune disease that causes hair loss.
“Keep my wife’s name out your fucking mouth,” Will yelled to Chris after the slap, as Lupita reacted with a shocked face behind him.
Lupita has now revealed in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter published on Wednesday what was going on in her head following the slap.
“Once the moment was over, I realised, ‘Oh my God, there’s no way all this transpired and I’m not in the shot,’” she said.
“I knew as soon as it was over that I was going to be a meme.”
Lupita’s prediction turned out to be true, as Twitter users pointed out her shocked look in the hours after the moment.
Lupita, however, kept mum about the rest of her takeaways from the moment that night.
“I don’t want to add any more fuel to that thing, quite frankly,” she told The Hollywood Reporter.