The days may now have ticked over into weeks since Chadwick Boseman passed away at the age of 43, but time won’t fill the hole he left behind. The Black Panther star kept his four-year battle with colon cancer a secret from all but those closest to him, leaving the film world as shocked as the public at his death.
One of those leading the tributes was MCU co-star Samuel L. Jackson and during a recent appearance on The Tamron Hall Show, he spoke about the last time he saw Boseman. Apparently, the two discussed making a project that will sadly never be realized now.
Yes, it’s sudden to us all. I was trying to remember the last time I’d actually seen Chadwick. And I was talking to Zoe, our daughter about it and it was at the Captain Marvel premiere. We walked and we started talking about another project that I had hoped that we were gonna work on. He was like, ‘I’m sorry, y’all, I’m not going to be there, but I wish we were gonna work together.’
We were talking about it, we had planned it for awhile and it was, you know, it’s gut-wrenching, you know, to lose someone that’s such an important part of the culture. In terms of what he became to the world with Black Panther. We all hope when we work that people will remember things that we will do. But he imprinted society in such a way, impacted especially the Black culture and giving kids a hero that they could aspire to. To lose him, I don’t even know if I could tell my kid that. It’s devastating.
Such was the privacy that Boseman chose to live his life by that nobody was planning for a future without him. Not director Ryan Coogler, who had been writing a script for Black Panther 2 with the belief that its main star would be in it, nor Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige, who reportedly only learnt he was even ill on the day of his passing. How the shock is processed by the franchise going forward is still difficult to say, though that pales in significance to the death of a talented, deeply loved young man. That shock will take far longer to process.
If you’ve got any thoughts of your own on Jackson’s moving remarks, leave them in the comments section below. We’ll never get to see the unmade film they discussed at the Captain Marvel premiere, but it’s a testament to Chadwick Boseman that he created such an empowering legacy with the handful of projects he did make. People are going to be watching and admiring what Black Panther stands for for years to come, that’s for sure.