Soon after Beyoncé was revealed as the cover star for Vogue’s September issue, rumors started circulating that actress Lupita Nyong’o would be covering the magazine for October.

It turns out the rumors were true. Shot by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggot, Nyong’o stuns in a series of couture looks by a range of premiere designers, such as Dior and Valentino.

The Oscar winner also talked about her early life in Kenya, and her father’s political career.

[…]politics were as ever-present in the Nyong’o household as style. Lupita’s father, Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o, now a senator, was for a long period an opposition politician under the repressive Moi regime. He spent three years in self-imposed exile with his family in Mexico, where Lupita was born.

The Nyong’os returned to Nairobi when Lupita was one. The following years she remembers as “scary, but I was at an age where you couldn’t fully understand what was happening.” Her father was at times detained in jail, once for an entire month, and the family “had to destroy a lot of his documents. I wasn’t allowed to go to school. We were basically locked up in the house. The curtains were shut all the time, and we were just burning papers.” She says the experience made her resilient. “I was definitely exposed to some extreme situations. Tragedy is something that I have known and that I have tried to accept as part of life. But I don’t dwell on it. . . . OK! I need to powder my nose!”