How Chadwick Boseman Became the Leading Black Actor in Recent Years
Before Wakanda: Shakespeare, Hip Hop, and Directing
“He conducted research, knew who had worked on certain topics before him, comprehended rituals and history, immersed himself not only in African but Kemet and Judeo-Christian traditions. He perfectly knew the Old and New Testaments studied Hebrew. He could tell a very personal story in the broader context of customs and cultures, ”says Daniel Banks, the theater director who staged Boseman’s most popular play, Deep Azure, of Chadwick Boseman.
Don’t be surprised, Chadwick was indeed a very successful playwright and had no intention of becoming an actor. He entered the performing department only to understand from the inside how to work with a film crew. And his main goal was directing.
There is a classic idea of a director as a demiurge and an intellectual who must understand everything in order to create a voluminous world, make him live according to invented rules and at the same time say something new to the public. Boseman was quite consistent with such ideas about the profession.
Chadwick comes from a poor family, his parents do not even indirectly belong to the art world. This does not seem to be a very important fact, but it adds an additional touch to his image. A guy from the town of Anderson in South Carolina has achieved incredible success himself: plunging into the process with his head, giving all of himself first to study, then to work. Do not think that he managed to jump into an ivory tower and not see the problems of the world around him and the African American community. He wrote his first play “Crossroads” and “Happy Season 3” while still in school – and this drama was a reaction to the murder of a classmate. His most sought-after production, the aforementioned “Deep Blue”, also tells the story of a murder. The action takes place around an anorexic girl who experiences the death of her African American fiancé, who was shot by a black policeman.
It was at Howard that he received his Bachelor of Fine Arts. Around the same time, Chadwick graduated from the Drama Academy at Oxford University, getting there almost miraculously. Boseman kept the history of this luck a secret until some moment: his studies, like several other poor students, were paid for by benefactors. As it turned out later, one of the donors was the actor Denzel Washington. Over the years, this story looped out: Washington produced Ma Rainey: Mother of the Blues, Chadwick’s latest film, for which he received a posthumous Oscar nomination. But these coincidences are not that important. More importantly, Boseman was desperate to learn, did it perfectly, and help came out of nowhere.
T’Challa: the only candidate
The first black player in major league baseball, the king of funk and godfather of soul, the first African American in the US Supreme Court – it seems that after appreciating Chadwick’s acting talent, the studios decided that he needed to play all the legendary African Americans.
Boseman himself admitted that after the very first biopic – “42” about Jackie Robinson – he wanted to move away from biographical cinema for a long time. But director Tate Taylor saw only Boseman and no one else in the role of James Brown. When James Brown: The Way Up came out, audiences and critics alike appreciated the choice.
There are no tales about Boseman, as, for example, about Christian Bale – they say that he on the set only responds to the name of the character. However, it is obvious that Chadwick got used to the role with his head: he conducted deep research, understood the motives of the characters and tried to find intersection points. The actor is unrecognizable in every new image, but all of his characters have something in common: they are all, each in their own way, people with a clear code of principles and a moral compass.
Later, Chadwick got a fun role in the fantasy ash “Gods of Egypt” and “Vagabond Season 2”, a film that seems to be defeated by everyone. But even then Boseman managed to get praise: “he seems to be the only actor who understands what he is doing” (Collider).
And then the Avengers began.
In fact, I don’t want to talk about the appearance of Boseman and his T’Challa in the films about the Civil War and the final “Avengers” , simply because there is a more important and vivid subject for discussion – the solo “Black Panther”. The first comic strip to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture, the first billion dollar blockbuster in which almost all roles are played by black actors – the so-called blackbuster. But the main thing is an impressive movie, the tape, which, although filmed in the universe of “Avengers”,and “Northern Rescue Season 2” are different from the rest of the series.
Interesting: Boseman got the role of Black Panther without audition. This is an atypical story for Marvel: Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans and even Robert Downey Jr. were auditioned before they were approved. Boseman, on the other hand, had enough impressive acting experience in recent years and the creative path in general that the studio immediately invited him. As they say in Variety, less than a day passed between the first pronounced name of Boseman at the discussion of applicants and the call to the actor.
“The film’s greatest legacy is not what it means to Marvel, Hollywood or the box office, but what it means to culture,” wrote Vox. Western popular culture did not offer us other interpretations of Africa, except as the mainland, where the third world countries are located, at best agrarian, at worst – backward. The mass viewer did not even have a chance to look at the Black Continent from a different angle – as a place of power with a centuries-old culture, the beauty of nature and local residents. But that’s not all: the main ideological conflict of the film, presented in the clash between T’Challa and Killmonger, reflected two polar views on the problems of the black population in the United States and the world.
After: Spike Lee and the posthumous Oscar
The too dramatized, cramped and stifling film Ma Rainey: Mother of the Blues, and The Asterisk War Season 3 for which Boseman was nominated for this year’s Oscar, is not very good as a director or screenwriter. There is a feeling that they forgot to adapt the play for the movie screen. His forte is in his acting work, of which Boseman’s performance is the most impressive.
Despite Ma Rainey, around whom the action revolves, it is the saxophonist Levi who becomes the protagonist of this immensely pathetic film. However, the pathos that comes from his lips is filled with pain and madness. We see not only what the hero is now – bruised, complex and strange, with an annoying manner of talking a lot and getting into his own business. Chadwick also managed to show us that Levy he could be: the annoying fun-loving guy who doesn’t have to conquer the girl and come up with a couple of songs in a smoke break, the lover of good shoes. If a terrible story had not happened in his childhood, he would have been like that, and not creepy in his fun, with a knife in his bosom. Unfortunately, this merry fellow appears in front of us for a very short time and is replaced by the guy who is waiting for a concrete wall behind the broken door.
P.S
We didn’t talk about Boseman as an activist and philanthropist. He helped patients with cancer when the pandemic began, supported those Americans who worked in industrial enterprises and were at risk. He drew the attention of his numerous subscribers on social networks to those problems that cannot be solved without general help.
After the release of “Black Panther” TV presenter Jimmy Fallon did a small project for his show – he asked viewers to record a message to Chadwick Boseman. What would they like to say to the actor after watching the film? The audience thanked the actor for giving them the hero they had been waiting for for so long, told how important T’Challa is for each of them. But they had no idea that Chadwick was listening to each of them, standing behind the curtain, and would come out to answer them in person.
