Lupita Nyong’o says her A Quiet Place: Day One cancer storyline was “therapeutic” after losing Marvel co-star Chadwick Boseman

A Quiet Place: Day One star Lupita Nyong’o says playing a character with cancer in the horror prequel was “therapeutic” after she lost her friend and fellow actor Chadwick Boseman to the disease in 2020.

In a new interview with PEOPLE, Nyong’o said it was “scary to have to go there” in a role where her character “is really facing their mortality, even before this apocalypse takes place, and whose life is slipping between her fingers.”

Nyong’o plays Sam in the franchise’s latest installment, a poet living in a hospice on the outskirts of New York who finds herself stranded in the city when monstrous noise-sensitive aliens invade with only her cat Frodo and lonely law student Eric (Joseph Quinn) for company.

“In the end, it was actually very therapeutic because I had just experienced not too many years ago the death of Chadwick Boseman, which shook me to my core. I definitely was thinking about that a lot,” she continued.

“What I came to realize is that it’s really important to be reminded of our mortality, because then we live life just a little more intentionally. When we think we have all the time in the world, we can really take people for granted and experiences for granted.”

Nyong’o worked with Boseman on the 2018 Marvel movie Black Panther – she played Nakia, a Wakandan spy and the former love interest of Boseman’s Prince T’Challa. Boseman died of colon cancer in August 2020 after a private struggle with his illness.

A Quiet Place: Day One is out now in theaters. For more on the movie, check out the rest of our coverage: 

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