MANILA, Philippines — Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o looked back on how filming the Black Panther sequel, Wakanda Forever, brought comfort and healing to the grieving cast after the loss of Chadwick Boseman.
During a virtual roundtable interview with Asia-Pacific press, including The STAR, the actress bared how it felt “very different” returning to the set without Boseman, who essayed the title role in what would become a milestone movie for Marvel.
Following a private, four-year battle with colon cancer, the actor who brought to life on the big screen the first Black superhero died in August 2020 at the age of 43, sending shockwaves to fans around the world.
It was even more pronounced for Lupita and the rest of the original cast, who were all feeling the loss on the set of Wakanda Forever. She admitted, “Coming back to this film, I had a whole lot of mixed emotions. I didn’t know how I was going to feel to be back in Wakanda.”
Nevertheless, she said that as they were going through exactly the same thing, it wasn’t hard to realize that they could “lean on each other, experience the grief together and just recommit to telling the story in his honor as well, as a way to comfort ourselves, heal ourselves and just commit to putting one foot in front of another.”
“So, it was really good actually to come back and to feel that bond that the old cast had and to really depend on it to move forward,” she added.
Lupita particularly gave special mention to new co-stars in the film for understanding “the loss that we were experiencing” and for being “very gracious.” According to the actress, they helped the original cast members find a reason to keep going.
“You know, a way to move forward and to just embrace them and bring them along with us on this incredible journey. And they ended up really affecting the journey and inspiring the future of Wakanda,” she added.
Meanwhile, Black Panther 2 included scenes where the people of Wakanda paid tribute to their King T’Challa who passed on. The character had not been recast in the sequel and to date, no actor had been brought in to replace Boseman.
So, when asked what it was like carrying out those scenes that hit so close to home, Lupita admitted, “It was heavy and easier than I’d like to admit because the grief was so present. You know, those were the scenes that needed very little preparation because it was speaking the truth of a feeling that we were all feeling.
“So, in a sense, it was a place to put the grief. It was actually very therapeutic to be able to put my real emotions into this fictitious story. And it felt useful, you know, to be able to use my emotions in that way and channel my emotions in that way.
“I was very happy to have those points where I could just allow for the grief to come out and that it was doing some good in telling a story because, ultimately, we all go to the cinema to step into someone else’s shoes but also to see ourselves more clearly. So, to be able to provide that for people who might be feeling grief for any number of reasons, it feels useful.”
On a more personal level, Lupita also got to honor the memory of her late co-star and love interest in the first Black Panther movie, thanks to a photo from director Ryan Coogler.
“When Chadwick passed away, a few days after his passing, Ryan Coogler sent me a photo he had taken on his phone from the first film of us together in one of the sets. And I printed that picture, framed it and had it in my trailer. So Chadwick was the first face I saw before I started my day’s work and the last face I saw when I got back to my trailer at the end of the day. It was just a daily reminder of who he was and what he had meant to us. And it was my way of carrying him along with us,” she shared.
And it wasn’t just Lupita as she herself pointed out that “everyone did something of that nature.”
She revealed, “The line producer actually created a call sheet and he reserved the No. 1 spot for Chadwick. So, a call sheet started with No. 2 and that was just a way, on a daily basis, to remember that Chadwick had been there. There were all these ways that people, everybody, dealt with it in a different way. And it’s all over our film. We definitely brought the spirit of Chadwick along with us for the duration of this.”
In Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, the actress reprises her role as the warrior princess Nakia. The film also stars Letitia Wright (Shuri), Danai Gurira (Okoye), Winston Duke (M’Baku), Florence Kasumba (Ayo), Dominique Thorne (Riri Williams), Michaela Coel (Aneka), Mabel Cadena (Namora), Alex Livinalli (Attuma), Tenoch Huerta (Namor), Martin Freeman (Everett Ross) and Angela Bassett (Queen Ramonda).
Based on the press notes, the sequel will see Queen Ramonda, Shuri, M’Baku, Okoye and the Dora Milaje fighting to defend their nation from intervening world powers in the aftermath of King T’Challa’s death. When Namor, the king of a hidden undersea nation, “alerts them to a global threat and his disturbing plan to thwart it, the Wakandans band together with the help of Nakia and Everett Ross, and forge a new path for the kingdom of Wakanda,” the synopsis further said.
In response to a question from The STAR about how intense the shoot for this movie was, Lupita recalled that it got so intense that at one point, she felt like it was going on “forever and ever and ever.”
“I mean, shooting this film in 2021 when it was still the height of the COVID pandemic was a challenge. It was not like the previous film, where we could move freely and stuff like that. We obviously had to keep our distance in order to remain healthy and in order to be able to do our work on a daily basis. So, that was its own kind challenge,” she said.
Besides the pandemic-induced restrictions, Lupita also said Wakanda Forever was a “very, very involving shoot.”
“You know from the trailer that there’s water involved and when water is involved, it is a whole other kind of technical challenge,” she said.
“When I read the script, I couldn’t even believe it! I was like, how on earth are we going to pull this off? So, I definitely learned a whole lot more tricks about shooting when you’re dealing with something as volatile as water.”
Without going into detail, Lupita said that due to “certain unavoidable circumstances,” they had to shoot Wakanda Forever for a prolonged period of time. But all of it was worth the effort and time, she indicated.
“So, after a while, we were just saying, ‘Oh, this is kind of forever and ever and ever and ever, we might never get out of here.’ But we did! I’m very happy that we now have a finished film to share with everyone and at the end of the day, all those challenges have been washed away,” she said.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, directed by Ryan Coogler and produced by Kevin Feige and Nate Moore, opens in Philippine cinemas on Nov. 9, with tickets now on sale.