Lupita Nyong’o Is Excited to Show Wild Robot to Nieces So They ‘Finally’ ‘Understand What I Do for a Living’ (Exclusive)

Lupita Nyong’o can’t wait for her nieces to see her new venture.

On Sunday, Sept. 8, the actress, 41, spoke to PEOPLE at the Toronto International Film Festival screening of her new movie The Wild Robot, out Sept. 27. Nyong’o revealed that she has a few particular people in mind that she can’t wait to see the film.

“My nieces, I have nieces,” she tells PEOPLE.

She continued to share that she immediately thought of her nieces upon reading the script for the first time. “I thought, ‘Oh boy, they’re finally going to understand what I do for a living!’ ” she added.

“I look forward to my nieces and nephews being able to watch this film and thinking of things like the Charlie Brown Christmas and Lion King, and these formative things for me and what they’ve done for my most impressionable years,” she explained. “This could be that for my nieces and nephews and they could have this direct relationship with it, not only because it’s a great story with a great message, but their auntie is in it.”

During an appearance on the June 20 episode of Late Night with Seth Myers, the Academy Award winner shared that the “super-positive voice” she uses in the upcoming animated film put such a strain on her voice that she developed a vocal cord polyp and had to go on three months of vocal rest.

Her character Roz, who is a robot, “goes through this journey to finding, I guess, what we would call humanity, like empathy.”

“And so at the start of the movie, I chose to do this very, kind of like, super-positive voice. And it was, like, just not in my vocal register, which is a lot lower,” she explained.

“I did it for way too long over a number of days, and I got a vocal polyp.” the A Quiet Place: Day One star said, adding that she “lost my ability to speak, and my doctor put me on vocal rest, and I was on vocal rest for three months.”

She also shared that she was scheduled to have surgery, but when her doctor told her 35% of people recover naturally, “I was so determined to be part of that 35%. And I did. I cured myself.”