Black Panther turns Chadwick Boseman into mega-brand actor
Marvel’s first black superhero has a cop thriller coming out and other projects on the go but a Panther sequel looms large.
Chadwick Boseman is the answer. The question is: “What does it look like when the film in which you play the beloved title character makes a billion dollars?” Boseman, of course, is Black Panther. When he’s not gussied up in his skintight Panther-tard (trademark bulletproof super-suit), he is the benevolent King T’Challa of the film’s fictional African nation, Wakanda. And when he’s not on hero duty at all, he’s busy becoming a one-man mega-brand actor, writer, director and producer, firing out a slew of high-profile movies before the arrival of Black Panther II in 2022.
“I haven’t been resting on my laurels,” says the 41-year-old. He’s here, in a hotel suite in London, to promote his latest film, the high-concept cop thriller 21 Bridges. “Instead, I said, ‘OK, what can I do in between time?’ So I shot this movie, then I shot a movie with Spike Lee, I shot a movie that Denzel (Washington) produced and I’ve got my own projects that I’m producing and writing. I’m taking advantage of the moment and establishing a brand that hopefully people will trust.”
Boseman, up close, is remarkably svelte. T’Challa’s bulging form, last seen bouncing impressively through the multi-punch melee of the Avengers: Endgame finale, has all but evaporated. Dressed in crisp brown jacket and trousers, Boseman is now a slimmed-down vegan (“although I have to eat fish, for my blood type”) and a committed juicer who is already factoring in the extra 14kg of muscle required for Black Panther II in his upcoming roles.
“I’ve scheduled it in my head where I’ll do two roles where I don’t have to bulk up, and then the following one will require a gradual size increase so that I can start training for Panther then.”
Boseman is soft, sincere, yet careful in conversation. He has spoken before about carrying the burden of being Black Panther “like a backpack”.
As the first black Marvel movie superhero, he is a clean-cut role model for millions and some of that reserve remains today.
He flinches at the idea of revealing what car he bought with his earnings (a Lexus LC 500h — thank you, Google) and is happier discussing the car that he bought for his father, a former cotton factory worker from South Carolina. “Being able to do things for your family is more significant to me,” he says, beaming. “My parents were always frugal. They sacrificed a lot for us. So paying for something my dad wants is very meaningful to me. He can’t grasp it, though. Like, ‘I can still fix this old car!’ And I have to say: ‘No, Dad. Let’s do away with that. We’re getting a new one.’ ”
This is very Boseman. He’s very, well, good. It seems to seep out of him, and it certainly finds its way onto the screen. His three biggest roles, pre-Black Panther, were biopics in which he brought a saintly quality to each character. In 42 he played Jackie Robinson, the first African-American to play Major League Baseball. It’s a film in which Harrison Ford’s team owner explicitly compares Robinson to Jesus: “You’re a living sermon in the wilderness, Jackie … everybody needs you.”
In Marshall, Boseman played Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American supreme court justice, who is an ingenious lawyer, but also supremely calm and selfless in the face of relentless racism. And even when he played the hellraising James Brown in Get On Up, Boseman managed to transform him into an inspirational guru who, after being humiliated by the Rolling Stones (they get a better slot on TV), turns to the camera and says: “I can’t never quit when it gets hard. If you quit you’re going backwards, and if you’re going backwards you’re dead. No, I take it and I flip it and I go forward. I live.”
Boseman’s character in 21 Bridges, Andre, is an evolution. He’s a New York police detective who is being investigated by internal affairs for use of excessive force (nine kills in eight years). It’s a nice mood-setter and plays with our preconceptions of the sweet guy from Wakanda. And yet, as the real bad guys emerge (notably in a propulsive gun battle outside a Brooklyn wine bar) we circle back towards Andre as a modern-day Clint Eastwood, and the only truly good character in the bunch.
“This type of movie is always best when you don’t quite know if you should be pulling for someone or not,” he says. “But yes, my character does have a moral compass that others don’t necessarily have.”
Boseman discusses his research for the film, which included ride-alongs with New York police detectives, who were on set as advisers, his near-obsessive attention to detail and his reluctance, when in character, to remove his hands from his pockets. “If you notice, there are lots of times when my hands are in my pockets when I arrive at a crime scene,” he says. “For me it was super-awkward, but that’s the way they do it. They don’t want to contaminate the evidence.”
We return to his saintly image — The New York Times said that Boseman “embodies black male dignity”. Does he ever feel tempted to play a repellent psychopath and thoroughly trash his brand? “If it’s right to trash it, yes,” he says. “I read a script a couple of weeks ago for some people who wanted me to do just that. But it just wasn’t right for me.”
He says he tries to humanise his characters by looking for something inside them, often in their past. Which leads us to Boseman’s past, and a pair of whopping biographical landmarks that reveal a lot about him and his screen persona.
When he was a high-school basketball star in South Carolina, a teammate was shot dead; the tragedy turned Boseman away from sport and towards a hitherto unexpressed interest in drama. Out of nowhere, apparently, he wrote a play about the experience, and called it Crossroads.
“That wasn’t necessarily about my teammate being killed,” he says. “But it was written because he was killed. And that’s essentially the reason why I started doing theatre. Because I had this real-life incident that I needed to figure out how to cope with.”
Boseman studied drama, specifically directing, at Howard University in Washington DC, with no acting ambitions. He moved to New York as a nascent playwright and director, putting on plays in off-Broadway theatres. He approached the legendary stage producer Woodie King Jr, who discovered Washington, casting him in 1981 as Malcolm X in the play When Chickens Come Home to Roost. Boseman asked him to produce his latest directorial gig, Ron Milner’s Urban Transition: Loose Blossoms. King said yes, but only if Boseman took the lead role. He agreed, and the rest is the story of a reluctant actor who, via small TV roles and a triumvirate of saintly biopics, became a megastar. “I didn’t ever see myself on stage, or in front of the camera,” Boseman says.
“Part of that is personality. I wasn’t necessarily raised to be the centre of attention. But I always had a story, a song or a soundtrack going on in my head. I just never saw it as something you were supposed to do.”
He lives in Los Angeles and is often photographed with his longtime girlfriend, Taylor Simone Ledward. “I would say fiancee, that’s what I would say now,” he says, confirming what a dozen paparazzi photos of the sparkler that appeared on Ledward’s ring finger late last month seemed to suggest. Of his Ledward he will only add: “She’s not in the industry, not at all.”
We move back to Black Panther and he reveals that the writer-director Ryan Cooglar is working on the sequel script and Boseman has hinted at where he would like T’Challa to go in this new adventure. “But when Ryan is writing, that’s his thing,” he says. “I can’t tell him what to write. I can only tell him what I feel would be good.”
He’s aware of the symbolic power of Black Panther, and how the film is part of a wave of black talent in Hollywood — the horror films of Jordan Peele, the artistry of Dee Rees’s Mudbound and the comic chutzpah of Donald Glover’s TV series Atlanta. But he’s under no illusion that full equality has arrived in Tinseltown.
“There’s this great thing happening in cinema, yes, for a small group of people who we’re all watching and celebrating,” he says. “But there’s still a lot of people who aren’t working, who don’t have opportunities and are still dealing with the same old prejudices on the way up the ladder.”
His own new films include the Vietnam War-era drama Da 5 Bloods for Lee, and an adaptation of August Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, set in the Chicago jazz scene of the 1920s, produced by Washington. Boseman has talked about how Washington anonymously funded Boseman’s trip to an Oxford summer school for drama students while he was in college. Washington has become a friend and mentor, he says. “Just knowing him and seeing how he is has not been disappointing.”
There are more forthcoming projects, and two films that he has written for himself and plans to direct. “When people see them they’ll understand more why I can’t talk about them now,” Boseman teases. Post-Panther, it seems that anything is possible.
“I’d be lying if I said that things haven’t changed for me,” he says, grinning broadly. “It definitely opens doors when your movie makes a billion dollars.”
The Times