How Chadwick Boseman brought power, purpose to Marvel’s ‘Black Panther’

Long before he was cast as the first black superhero of the modern Marvel era, and before he brought the Avengers-adjacent King T’Challa of Wakanda to life in his own groundbreaking standalone tentpole, Chadwick Boseman was keeping notes on what a “Black Panther” movie should be.

“I can remember several times writing in my journals, ‘That would be a cool thing to see in Black Panther’ — ideas from real life, from real history, or real archaeology or architecture,” said Boseman, 40.

“The projects that I end up doing, that I want to be involved with in any way, have always been projects that will be impactful, for the most part, to my people — to black people,” said Boseman, a playwright and theater director turned actor and, now, blockbuster movie star. “To see black people in ways which you have not seen them before. So ‘Black Panther’ was on my radar, and in my dreams.”

“Having first come to wide attention as baseball legend Jackie Robinson in 2013’s “42,” Boseman went on to play James Brown in “Get On Up” the following year and then-future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in last year’s “Marshall.” That run of critically acclaimed performances cemented Boseman as a go-to actor for (real life) heroes even before the high-profile “Black Panther” gig came along.

Fifty-two years after debuting in the pages of Marvel Comics, the character created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby is getting his biggest pop culture berth yet. Directed by “Fruitvale Station” and “Creed” helmer Ryan Coogler and co-written by Coogler and Joe Robert Cole, “Black Panther” arrives in theaters on a wave of overwhelming critical acclaim and is poised for a domestic box office opening of more than $150 million.

Boseman and Coogler, 31, have already made an impact with their take on “Black Panther,” a sprawling work of Afrofuturistic fantasy flair exploding its way out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe formula and flourishing in the absence of, well, the Avengers. Instead of Tony Stark and his crew, it’s Boseman’s T’Challa and his fellow countrymen and women — played by Lupita Nyong’o, Daniel Kaluuya, Danai Gurira, Forest Whitaker, Letitia Wright, Winston Duke and Angela Bassett, leading a predominantly black cast — who take center stage.

The lineup of black talent in front of and behind the camera, unprecedented for a movie of this scale, has already established Coogler’s film as a standard-bearer for black representation in Hollywood. Even the setting — the fictional African country of Wakanda, a tech-forward tribalist nation that has long kept its advances, and its stockpiles of the powerful metal vibranium, secret from the outside world — is revolutionary in the comic book genre.

Coogler’s world-building is transporting and vibrant, weaving the DNA of African cultures into the fabric of the film with the help of collaborators both new (veteran costume designer Ruth E. Carter) and familiar (production designer Hannah Beachler, cinematographer Rachel Morrison). But it’s within the fraught dynamic between the hero and his primary adversary where “Black Panther” deftly explores subversive and probing concerns around race, history, heritage and identity.

Building off T’Challa’s introduction in “Captain America: Civil War,” Boseman steps fully into the hero’s suit with stately gravitas as the newly crowned king wavers between his late father’s isolationist principles and the impulse to open Wakanda to the world.