Lupita Nyong'o Learned About Chadwick Boseman's Death From Viola Davis
Lupita reveals that she had known Chadwick was sick, but not that he was terminally ill, and ultimately, learned about his passing from Viola Davis in a text.
“I couldn’t believe it. I was paralyzed,” she recalls. “He had an aura. He was the leader for [Black Panther], and we were all good with it.”
She continued, “He affected how I move in the world, but that’s the thing about Chadwick. Chadwick wasn’t trying to have everyone be like him. What he inspired was you to be your best self. So how I’m going to lead a set is nowhere near — I’m not that person. I’m not Chadwick at all. I’ll never be.”
Later on in the interview, Lupita also touched on the choice to not recast the role of T’Challa after his passing, and the script change.
“That is not the death of the Black Panther, that’s the whole point,” she says. “It’s laying to rest [T'Challa] and allowing for real life to inform the story of the movies. I know that there are all sorts of reasons why people want him to be recast, but I don’t have the patience. I don’t have the presence of mind, or I don’t have the objectivity to argue with that. I don’t. I’m very biased.”
Lupita also said that she had a hard time imagining what a Black Panther sequel could be without Chadwick: “Even just talking about Black Panther in the midst of still grieving Chadwick, it was really complicated emotionally to do.”
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