When Chadwick Boseman was cast in Black Panther as the first cinematic black superhero, he knew that far more than his own acting career was at stake. In the 2018 film, which is based on a Marvel comic book, Boseman plays T’Challa, the king of the fictional African nation of Wakanda, the most technologically advanced civilisation on earth. When required T’Challa can transform into Black Panther, a warrior with superhuman powers that he uses to protect his people.
It was not only Boseman’s biggest break, but also a watershed moment for Hollywood and the African-American community. With Black Panther being the first superhero film with a predominantly black cast, a black director (Ryan Coogler) and black writers, Boseman was acutely aware that it was the vehicle for the aspirations and ambitions of an entire people at a time when the #OscarsSoWhite campaign had forced the film industry to examine its attitude to race. Meanwhile, the Black Lives Matter movement was mobilising against wider racial injustice.
With great expectations resting on his shoulders Boseman’s response was to immerse himself in African culture, ensuring that he brought as much authenticity to the film as was humanly possible when playing a superhero. He asked his father to take a DNA test to learn more about the origins of his slave ancestors, who were traced back to several west African ethnic groups: Yoruba from Nigeria, Limba from Sierra Leone, and Jola from Guinea-Bissau.
He talked to a traditional Yoruba priest, known as a babalawo, made two research trips to South Africa, read about Masai warriors and Shaka Zulu, and studied the speeches of Nelson Mandela and Patrice Lumumba while listening endlessly to the songs of Fela Kuti, the Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer. For the fight scenes he trained in African martial arts, including Nigerian Dambe boxing and Zulu stick fighting. “When you’re doing a character, you want to know the full landscape,” he said. “You want to know them spiritually, mentally and physically.”
Once filming started he brought the same intensity of purpose to the set. “We all know what it’s like to be told that there is not a place for you to be featured, yet you are young, gifted and black,” he said. “We know what it’s like to be told, ‘There’s not a screen for you to be featured on, a stage for you to be featured on’ — and that is what we went to work with every day. We knew that we had something special that we wanted to give the world — that we could be full human beings in the roles that we were playing, that we could create a world that exemplified a world that we wanted to see.”
The result was that Boseman imposed his personality on the film, presenting not only a superhero but also a powerful and charismatic black man who is the leader of a thriving African nation while also being sensitive, vulnerable and self-questioning. His portrayal held the film together and Black Panther smashed the age-old Hollywood nostrum that a black-led, big-budget mainstream film could not succeed. The film was the first superhero movie to be nominated for a best picture Oscar, earning six other nominations and winning three. It took more than $1.3 billion at global box offices and became the ninth highest-grossing film in cinema history.
Such was the excitement when Black Panther was released that community groups rented out theatres to screen it, many black cinemagoers dressed in African costumes, and there were crowd-funding campaigns to buy tickets for black children who otherwise would not be able to afford to see it.
The film also made Boseman one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars and he reprised the role in two further Marvel superhero movies, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. The latter is the highest-grossing film yet.
What was unknown to anyone other than family and close friends was that while making the films, Boseman was undergoing surgery and chemotherapy in a four-year battle against colon cancer, which was diagnosed in 2016. His reticence to reveal his condition was characteristic of the dignified privacy that he retained about his personal life, although he approached his responsibilities as an African-American role model with a seriousness that bordered on gravity. Asked about his childhood heroes he cited Malcolm X and Martin Luther King alongside Bob Marley and the hip-hop group Public Enemy, and accused President Trump of “giving voice to white supremacy”.
Chadwick Aaron Boseman was born in 1976 in Anderson, South Carolina, the youngest of three brothers. His mother, Carolyn (née Mattress), was a nurse and his father, Leroy Boseman, worked in a textile factory and had an upholstery business on the side. His oldest brother, Derrick, is a Baptist preacher and his other brother, Kevin, is a dancer and singer whose credits include a production of The Lion King.
A quiet child with a passion for drawing and who wanted to be an architect, he recalled racism as a fact of life growing up in the South. “I’ve been called ‘n***er,’ run off the road by a redneck, seen trucks flying Confederate flags on the way to school,” he said.
His focus changed when a fellow member of his high school basketball team was shot and killed. Boseman’s response to the tragedy was to write a play about the incident, which was staged at his school. “I just had a feeling that this was something that was calling me,” he said. “Suddenly, playing basketball wasn’t as important.”
He studied to be a theatre director at Howard, the university for black students in Washington, and won a place with the British American Drama Academy on a summer theatre programme at Magdalen College, Oxford. He lacked the funds to take up the offer until his tutor persuaded Denzel Washington to pay for him. In Britain he studied Shakespeare, Beckett and Pinter, but reported feeling that “black writers are just as classical . . . It’s as difficult to do August Wilson, and the stories he’s telling are just as epic”. His final film is an adaptation of Wilson’s play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which is yet to be released.
Moving to New York, Boseman fell into acting. “I started out as a writer and a director and only started acting because I wanted to know how to relate to the actors so that I could better guide them,” he said. “During the course of that, I caught the acting bug.”
There were various TV roles but his film breakthrough came playing Jackie Robinson, the first black man to play major league baseball, in the 2013 film 42.
He followed that by playing two further African-American trailblazers who left an indelible mark on black culture in contrasting ways. In Get On Up (2014) he portrayed James Brown, the “godfather of soul”, with a fierce, sexually charged swagger. Three years later, in Marshall, he played Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American Supreme Court justice, brilliantly conveying the drama of defending a black man accused of raping a white woman.
To all these Boseman brought the same intensity and depth of research that characterised his performance in Black Panther. It was a method that involved getting so far into his characters that he joked of having to be “exorcised” after filming had finished. In portraying African-American icons he had become one himself.
His first film as a producer was 21 Bridges (2019), in which he also starred as a New York cop tackling gang crime. Most recently he was seen as the leader of a group of black soldiers in the Vietnam War film Da 5 Bloods, directed by Spike Lee, who described making the film in Thailand.
“It was hot, jungles, mountains, and Chadwick was there with us all the way,” said Lee in a tribute to the actor. “I never, ever suspected that anything was wrong . . . Chadwick, a trooper, never complained. He was there every single minute in the moment. And his performance is a testament to what he put into that role, and all his roles.”
Boseman is survived by the singer Taylor Simone Ledward, his partner for the past five years. It was revealed in the family’s announcement of his death that the couple had married in secret during the final months of his life.
Marvel fans had hoped that he would appear in Black Panther II, which is scheduled for 2022, but he also had his own list of movie projects he wanted to realise. “There’s a plethora of stories in our culture that haven’t been told because Hollywood didn’t believe they were viable,” he said. Although he is not around to tell them, Boseman’s impact changed the culture to the point that there is now every chance that somebody else will.
Chadwick Boseman, actor, was born on November 29, 1976. He died of colon cancer on August 28, 2020, aged 43
