The family, friends, colleagues and fans of Chadwick Boseman are still reeling from the actor’s death last summer, but the Marvel Cinematic Universe is forging ahead with continuing his legacy as production on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever gears up to begin next month.
Plot details remain firmly under wraps, and the only new addition to the cast confirmed so far is Narcos: Mexico star Tenoch Huerta, who’s already survived a cancellation attempt shortly after being rumored as Namor, but one of the franchise’s longtime residents with strong ties to the fictional African nation is Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes, with the actor also being linked to a Wakanda Forever cameo.
Bucky’s time in Wakanda enabled him to put his troubled past as a brainwashed assassin behind him, a plot thread that was paid off in hugely emotional fashion during Disney Plus series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and in a new interview, Stan admitted that he was hoping to reunite with Boseman’s T’Challa somewhere down the line.
“With him, I was always really enamored because I remember on that Civil War movie we met and he had come in and he was new and it’s sort of the introduction of his character. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, this guy is going to blow everyone away’. You know what I mean? There was such a commitment and dedication to everything he was doing. It was just so crazy. And we had a lot of these fight sequences and I remember being terrified of going into those scenes with him. And we went for it. We really went for it. Because I was like, ‘Okay, he’s really showing up. I got to stand tall. I got to show up’, and then afterwards we would just do these little fist bumps, like, ‘Cool, we’re good’.
Then after we shot, I spent some time, a little bit, when we would tease each other on these press tours and we would be laughing. It was really cool. And I just, in my head, I’d always hoped that there was just going to be more. So it’s just crazy to even wrap my mind around the idea of being in any world without him there. I just can’t even imagine it really in my mind. But obviously I always felt like, in my little scene at the end of Black Panther, I was always like, ‘Ah, I’m part of the war. I’m part of that movie’. I felt so good, that little scene.”
The centenarian super solider arguably has the closest connection to the Black Panther side of the MCU mythos outside of Ryan Coogler’s ensemble, so it’s still not completely out of the question that Stan could yet swing by Wakanda Forever to continue his redemption arc, although it’ll be a while before we get any concrete information in regards to the project.
In broad terms, Black Panther was fairly self-contained by the standards of the shared universe, but the doors have since been kicked open after Wakanda played host to an intergalactic battle as part of Avengers: Infinity War, so more connective tissue being added into the mix wouldn’t take much of a stretch.
