Lupita Nyong’o appears on next month’s cover of Harper’s Bazaar UK, and the Oscar-winning actress used to occasion to speak out about, well, why she speaks out.

“I don’t feel like the responsibility I feel comes from any place other than my gut,” said Nyong’o, who has perhaps been most vocal about the importance of diverse female role models in the arts and beauty worlds. “I feel a responsibility to speak about certain things because I wish someone had spoken about them for me…. I know I’m in a unique position where lots of people all over the world are seeing me and connecting with me, and perhaps because of my demographic and how limited representation is for my demographic, I do feel not a responsibility but an impetus to speak. … It’s 2015, man. We could all use some diversity. It can get tedious to have to explain that I speak English because Kenyans speak English.”

Nyong’o will next appear in “Star Wars: Episode VII: The Force Awakens” (Christmas 2015) and lend her voice to the live-action “Jungle Book,” to be released next year. She has also optioned novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s trans-Atlantic intellectual romance “Americanah.”

[via Latina, Harper’s Bazaar UK]