Thanks to Ryan Coogler’s wildly successful Black Panther, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has successfully redeemed two Human Torches: Chris Evans, who went on to become Captain America, and Michael B. Jordan.
The latter is a Coogler favorite, having headlined both Fruitvale Station and Creed. But for Black Panther, Michael B. Jordan flipped the switch into full-blown villain mode as he stepped into the shoes of one Erik Killmonger, a deeply complex Marvel villain with a long-standing grudge against T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), whose father, T’Chaka, abandoned Killmonger in Oakland and essentially rendered him an orphan.
What you have here is a nuanced and inherently tragic arc, and it’s a testimony to Michael B. Jordan’s performance that Killmonger’s journey never once strained credulity. Don McGregor certainly thinks so, too, and spoke to Nerdist about his own take on Jordan and Black Panther as a whole:
Michael B. Jordan was great as Killmonger. The thing that actually struck me the most was that I love Chadwick [Boseman] as T’Challa. I always thought that T’Challa should have a quiet dignity. He doesn’t have to raise his voice, he walks in the room and he’s the guy. And if trouble’s gonna happen, you want him there to come in and back your play. To have Angela Bassett playing Ramonda, another character I created, was so beautiful.
As the creative mind responsible for Killmonger – not to mention Wakanda’s Queen Mother, Ramonda – McGregor knows a thing or two about Black Panther‘s mythos, and here, he outlines his own contribution to the comic book lore:
I knew I wanted to write about revolutions, the upheaval that it causes to everybody’s lives. It would allow me to weave a tapestry where I could do one major theme that could go throughout the series and cross individual chapters. So I could do something political or something about domestic violence or something about religion.
Black Panther is in theaters now.
Published: Feb 22, 2018 11:56 am