Press junkets are ‘torture’ says Lupita Nyong’o

Black Panther star’s irritation at repeating herself to successive interviewers echoes earlier comments by Cillian Murphy, Tom Hanks and others

The press junket is one of the film industry’s necessary evils; a way of shoehorning the maximum amount of media attention into the minimum possible time. But the famous faces who are a press junket’s most powerful attractions don’t always enjoy the experience of dealing with the conveyor belt of interviews and public appearances.

The latest to suggest the press junket is a less than ideal experience is Lupita Nyong’o, star of Us, Black Panther and 12 Years a Slave, who called them a “torture technique”. In an interview with Glamour magazine to promote her latest film A Quiet Place: Day One, Nyong’o said she finds press junkets “irritating” and that the process of doing one interview after another where “different people are being ferried in” to be a “torture technique”. She added: “You have to give each one of them attention, focus, and an articulate answer that you just gave to the person before. That’s irritating.”