When Chadwick Boseman passed away in 2020, the picture his fans saw was the Marvel Studio rushing to fix the gaping hole left in the MCU by the absence of its beloved T’Challa. But while there are, undoubtedly, big bucks involved and a way had to be found to continue Black Panther’s story in Wakanda Forever, the whole process wasn’t as mechanical as many think it was.
In a new podcast by Marvel, director Ryan Coogler has talked in depth about what went down in the wake of the world losing an exemplary artist like Boseman. The script for the sequel was all written and approved before the actor died, so Coogler had to rewrite it from scratch. But it wasn’t an easy task, not simply because he had to accommodate the fact that one of MCU’s biggest superheroes wasn’t going to be around anymore.
He was heartbroken over losing a dedicated soul like Boseman who powered through the most difficult stunts in the first film and never considered quitting as an option.
Coogler even considered leaving the sequel altogether. “I thought of all of that. I think everyone did bro. Yeah, I think everybody did. I’m not gonna lie to you cuz, that was relatively short-lived,” he added.
The Wakanda Forever director was initially unaware that Boseman was suffering from colon cancer. Though the actor was “an expert on withholding information,” he eventually came to know that Boseman had been sick since the day he met him. When the Marshall star passed away, all Coogler could think about was how the actor never once said no to any scenes the director asked him to do, no matter the physical toll it took on his health.
“Fight this dude, hang off of this thing, jump off of this pad… And some days when I would find him doing things that were inexplicable. Like we would do these things in the water, the waterfall stuff, it would take him a long time to warm back up. Like, he’d need to be in the warming tent for like a long time. Or some days I’d find him incredibly sad. But looking back I was like oh man, my man was dying.”
In the end, it was Boseman’s never-give-up mantra that gave Coogler the motivation he needed to make the sequel a reality.
“It’s a shocking thing to realize and it’s also a thing where it’s like ‘oh yeah, I can’t quit’ if he did all that while he was going through that, this was just grief. So it’s just like, we gotta push through.”
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is all set to hit theaters this Nov. 11.
