Chadwick Boseman Fun Facts: 6 Things To Know About ‘Black Panther’ Star

Don’t be fooled by Ryan Coogler’s laid-back Oakland accent.

Marvel Studios is one of the most successful brands in Hollywood. Ryan Coogler and co-writer Joe Robert Cole may have found a solution.

There T’Challa reigns supreme over a futuristic city African nation-think Singapore on cocaine-a place forever shrouded in a cloaked mist that not only shields the Wakandian people from the rest of the civilized world but allows for its uninterrupted growth and development. Can superhero films, so often a boring mash of effects, be this dazzlingly colorful? It’s Korean-inspired, but it’s got a handsome James Bond feel. “Your personal life bleeds into your professional life”.

At points it feels nearly as if that the film wishes it could singlehandedly make up for years of black spec-fic and genre fiction that just never got a chance to be thanks to white cultural hegemony, and that is most decidedly not a slur against it.

What sets Black Panther apart from our vast stable of superhero films is that, beyond being entertaining and attractive, it manages every aesthetic and narrative choice with a pained intelligence that cuts to the contradictions it has to traverse. While Boseman does a good job in the role, he feels like the least interesting characters in his own movie.

One of the best characters, though, is the setting.

Among them, three stand out. I won’t spoil exactly how things played out, except to say the uprising eventually had an effect on Wakanda’s political structure.

Chadwick Boseman did not have to audition for “Black Panther“. Starting with Nakia, T’Challas ex-girlfriend played by Lupita Nyong’o, a spy that starts to question Wakanda’s isolationist policy. Wakandan spy, and Black Panther’s former love interest, Nakia (played by Oscar victor Lupita Nyong’o) believes it should be used to better the lives of those suffering in surrounding countries.

Okoye is the general of the guards and T’Challa’s most trusted friend. Angela Bassett’s costume as Ramonda, T’Challa’s mother, is remarkable.

Tell me about melding the character of Shuri from what she is the comics into sort of a female Q in this movie. In our film, he’s just now taking the throne. The first mission even pits T’Challa against a Boko Haram-like guerilla. This is a movie so marvelously and normatively black that the white adversary – played by a maniacally colorful Andy Serkis – fails to arouse much interest. Michael B. Jordan plays Erik Killmonger, a man as unsafe as he is charismatic. They never get excluded from the action. Critics have pointed out the filmmaker’s ease with the superhero hallmarks that make these movies so much fun: the snappy one-liners, the non-stop action, the scenery-chewing villains, the vast, visual creativity.

Of course, there is opposition to the reign of this new king as Michael. What and who he finds there will rock him to his foundations, possibly kill him, and endanger the world as we know it.

Unlike many of its more hollow predecessors, “Black Panther” has real, honest-to-goodness stakes. It’s not a place where, because you’re young, you don’t get a chance to lead, and because you’re old, we don’t cast you aside. It’s to everyone’s benefit that he changed his mind, as his Black Panther run remade the character as smarter than Batman and sneakier, too; a political genius one step ahead of everyone else, yet still stymied by society, the system, and the stupidity of those around him. Wakanda’s got both. According to a legend outlined near the start of the movie, the land that would become Wakanda was originally inhabited by five different tribes (pared down from 18 in the comics).