Black Panther: Marvel’s first black superhero one for screen diversity
More than 50 years after Marvel’s Black Panther first appeared in comic-book form, the superhero will appear on screen.
Chadwick Boseman has Australia to thank for clarifying his future. He was in Sydney in 2014 filming Gods of Egypt when Charles Carter, a member of the film’s security team, left him a message. “Charles put a comic book in my trailer,” Boseman says. It was a 1977 edition of a Black Panther comic and with it was a note that read, “I want you to play this role. I think you’re going to play this role.”
Playing the first black superhero lead in the Marvel cinematic universe was something Boseman had in the back of his mind, but it was a relief to have someone else articulate the idea. Within a year, it had happened: he had signed a five-picture deal that included a stand-alone Black Pantherfeature. Black Panther, which opens worldwide this month, finally takes us to a new place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and from the footage released so far, it’s a vivid, energetic, visually inventive work. It’s a diverse film, with a black creative team that includes co-writer-director Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station, Creed) and a terrific, predominantly black cast. The cinematographer is Rachel Morrison, who has just become the first female Oscar nominee for best cinematography. Kendrick Lamar has curated and produced the soundtrack and written songs for the film.
The figure of T’Challa, aka Black Panther, was introduced to Marvel Comics in 1966, when Jack Kirby and Stan Lee created him for an issue of The Fantastic Four. This appeared several months before the founding of the revolutionary organisation the Black Panther Party.
In 1973, he began to appear as a solo character with his own story arcs. Marvel’s Black Panther is a hero, a warrior, a king. He comes from Wakanda, a fictional African country, and the role of Black Panther has been passed down from ruler to ruler over generations. Wakanda combines tradition with innovation yet has managed to keep its remarkable technological advances a secret from the rest of the world. One of its most valuable resources is a vibranium, a substance that absorbs vibrations — everything from sounds to the impact of bullets. Very few people outside Wakanda are entrusted with it, although Captain America’s shield, given to him by T’Challa’s grandfather, is made from vibranium.
When Boseman was first introduced to movie audiences as T’Challa in Captain America: Civil War (2016), he was accompanying his father, King T’Chaka (John Kani), to an international conference in Vienna, where the king was assassinated; the repercussions from his death are still being felt in Black Panther.
Boseman was aware that in the new film he would be playing a grieving son with a new set of responsibilities, but he knew little more about the film in the early stages.
Before he was given a script, he started to do his homework, to immerse himself in the world he was about to enter. “It’s necessary to read as much as you can of the comic books,” he says. “It was important for me to see how the character progressed over time, with all those different writers. Just being abreast of each of them was a task in itself.
“When you’ve done that there’s actual African history and culture that you can dive into and try to pull certain things from — movement, dance, fighting styles, language, all of those things which you play around with until you have something more focused. Once you have a script you say, well, this goes here, that goes there, I can’t use this in this version, but I can use that. You dive into the world.”
Boseman began as an aspiring writer-director who originally studied acting to help him with his writing. Classes with actress and teacher Phylicia Rashad helped him decide to focus on performance, although he still has plans to write and direct, he says.
He has already played some significant real-life figures, including Jackie Robinson and James Brown. In Marshall, he was Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American judge on the Supreme Court, in a story that explored a case early in the young lawyer’s career. Marshall’s director was Reginald Hudlin, a filmmaker who coincidentally had a stint beginning in 2005 as a writer for the Black Panthercomics.
Hudlin admired the work done by an earlier writer, Christopher Priest, and was keen to see a Black Panther who could stand alongside Captain America as a figure of equal authority and strength, He also felt it was important to emphasise Wakanda’s history of independence, the fact it had never been conquered either by neighbouring peoples or European invaders.
Priest, Marvel’s first African-American writer, began in the late 1970s and worked on a range of characters. In 1998, he was invited to collaborate on a new Black Panther arc in an imprint called Marvel Knights, intended to give familiar characters an edgier slant. Priest made some important innovations in the 62 stories he wrote. He created the Dora Milaje, a powerful team of female bodyguards devoted to the king. He focused on T’Challa as a ruler rather than a superhero. He also introduced the figure of Everett K. Ross, a US government agent played by Martin Freeman, who appeared in Captain America: Civil War and turns up in the new film.
The most recent Black Panther comics are written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who began a new series in 2016.
Black Panther pits its hero against a powerful rival: Erik Killmonger, played by Michael B. Jordan, who already had a brief foray into the superhero universe in The Fantastic Four (2015), a thoroughly unsuccessful Fox reboot of one of its Marvel properties.
As a teenager, Jordan had some memorable TV roles: he was a youngster struggling to survive on the streets in the first season of The Wire and a troubled quarterback in Friday Night Lights. He had his first lead role in Ryan Coogler’s directing debut, Fruitvale Station, based on a true story, which showed the last 24 hours in the life of a young African-American man killed in an encounter with transit police officers in the early hours of New Year’s Day. He was in Coogler’s second feature, Creed, a new film in the Rocky franchise, playing the son of Apollo Creed, carving out his own destiny as a boxer.
Filming with Coogler again, Jordan says: “It’s as easy as making a movie can be when you have a sure hand in charge. We get each other, we speak the same language.
“It’s comforting to know that I can take risks. I trust him.”
Much has been made of the fact that Jordan, a charismatic, appealing actor, is playing his first villain. Yet he doesn’t quite see it that way. Killmonger — who first appeared in Marvel comics in the 1970s — might be pitted against the hero of the film, but that doesn’t necessarily make him a bad guy. Jordan thinks of him as someone with different priorities from those of the hero. When he challenges T’Challa, it’s about more than power. “He wants the throne, he doesn’t agree with the way the country has been run, he thinks he can do a better job.”
Boseman describes T’Challa and Killmonger as “two sides of the same coin”.
Preparing to play Killmonger, Jordan studied dissent and activism. “I listened to a lot of Tupac, I channelled a lot of that. Malcolm X is someone I read up on, and I refamiliarised myself with Marcus Garvey, Huey P. Newton, Fred Hampton” — the latter two, as it happens, are important figures in the Black Panther Party. “These are the people I really paid attention to, and sought to pull from a little bit here and there.”
In the comic books, Killmonger was taken from Wakanda as a child and brought up in the US. It’s not clear how much the Fred Hampton of the movie — a US black ops soldier — shares with his comic-book character, and Jordan is careful not to say too much, but it seems he’s a man with conflicted feelings about his origins. “He definitely has identity issues, identity is a big theme with him,” Jordan says.
“I feel that’s something that as a black man in America I struggle with my entire life. It’s not something that’s far from my reality to understand having identity issues with certain things, especially about culture, where you’re from, stuff like that.”
Playing Killmonger, he says, “I get to unapologetically play an extreme version of some things that I might have felt at one point in my life. It’s a creative release to get a lot of things off my chest and to embody a character and do and say things that I normally couldn’t do.”
He also put plenty of effort into physical preparation, he says. “Erik Killmonger is a Swiss Army knife. He’s got a little bit of everything and I wanted to be well versed in whatever that was. I trained with weapons, guns, different styles of martial arts.” He worked out with Corey Caillet, who had trained him for Creed. “I wanted to be physically intimidating: I put on about 25lb (11kg) to be the biggest and heaviest I’ve ever been.”
Black Panther is a male-centred superhero movie, but there are many significant female characters. “They’ve all got unique qualities and energies,” Boseman says, and they all play an important part in T’Challa’s world, as friends, family members or warriors. There are four in particular that he singles out.
“Ryan picked four really strong actresses to play those characters and I think it will be refreshing.” His 16-year-old sister Shuri, played by Letitia Wright, is a brilliant designer and inventor who works with new technology. Then there’s Okoye (Danai Gurira of The Walking Dead), the head of the Dora Milaje; Nakia, a Wakandan secret agent (Lupita Nyong’o) and Ramonda, T’Challa’s regal mother, played by Angela Bassett.
Is Black Panther — with all his powers, his supporters, his soldiers, his suit of woven vibranium — vulnerable in any way? Boseman qualifies this carefully.
T’Challa, as leader of Wakanda, is a superhero with civic responsibilities and his people are divided over the country’s future in the wake of the king’s assassination. “So I think his decision-making is challenged because of that. There’s an inner conflict there. And also he didn’t save his father, so there’s a certain amount of guilt. All of those are points of impact that could be vulnerable places.”
Black Panther opens on February 15.
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