Chadwick Boseman 1976-2020
The actor made his name playing historic giants and one legendary superhero — but it’s the strength and dignity of the man we’ll remember most
He made his name playing historic giants, but it’s his strength and dignity we’ll remember most.
Chadwick Boseman broke into movies in 2013, at the age of 35. He was gone only seven years later, at 43. When he died, we all began to tout the majestic array of names among his achievements: Jackie Robinson, James Brown, Thurgood Marshall. Most important, though, is the fictional but — thanks to Boseman — very much living and lived-in T’Challa, king of Wakanda. In the midst of a moment as ideologically fractured as ours, the Black Panther hero is an unlikely unifier in a world beset with chaos. Boseman’s was a strange, wondrous, meteoric career snuffed out; a career that reads, in retrospect, like a political project, an attitude toward history and how we tell it.
Boseman’s approach to performance upended the usual rituals of actorly impersonation. His masculinity was specked with surprising, vulnerable texture while sacrificing none of the strength of mind or character common among the men he portrayed. He practically made a career out of playing historic figures to whom he bore little to no resemblance, and managed, always, to make it not matter. He seemed eager to redirect our attention to what mattered more: not ritually replaying the past, but providing an idea about it and broadening the terms of Hollywood’s expectations for a black actor. It is hard, for this reason, to imagine another like him.
Unlike with other promising black actors of his generation, comparisons to other black men, particularly actors, never made immediate sense. He wasn’t a loose cannon who cleaned up well, à la Wesley Snipes, or a powder keg in wait, like Denzel Washington. He wasn’t as noble as Morgan Freeman at the height of the latter’s career. He was of a class with those men; he wasn’t those men. Rather, his was nobility in another sense — the regal, principled calm of a man who didn’t question whether he deserved to be here. Chadwick Boseman with impostor syndrome? Difficult to imagine.
The working-class, South Carolina-born Boseman was a Howard man. He’d fallen in love with the superhero Black Panther while a student at the esteemed historically black college, working at an African bookstore. He would later tell TaNehisi Coates, a fellow Howard alum, that, in fact, he saw more of himself in the movie’s villain, Killmonger (played by Michael B. Jordan), who — unlike the royal T’Challa — grew up poor and knew racism and gun violence firsthand. At Howard, he took an acting class with Phylicia Rashad, and from there his path, though not without detours, seemed set: acting training overseas, in Oxford; a teaching gig at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, back in New York; and in 2008, his first recurring role on TV, which would kick off a series of smaller TV roles. His breakout, filmed when he was 35 — late, in an industry still smitten with youth — was as Jackie Robinson in 2013’s 42. An auspicious beginning.
He was a keen political thinker, a lifelong student of his craft. His radiant intelligence, apparent in every performance, made us curious about his choices. In 2014’s Get On Up, his James Brown looked nothing like the man but somehow was more and more uncanny with every swing of Boseman’s body and attitude. Suddenly, in another film, such as Marshall, or even Black Panther, he’s hitting us with that sharp wit, that lethal but playful seriousness familiar to a very black, very American style of political charisma.
Yet still, Boseman kept surprising us. Black Panther’s success ushered forth many pronouncements about the ability of a nearly all-black cast to conquer the world market, in defiance of long- and still-running Hollywood assumptions about what films about black people could and couldn’t do. Who could possibly have played T’Challa the way he did? Who else could have made it look so easy?
We did not only love Boseman because he was a great actor (he was), nor only for the social value of the roles he played. He had that something. Call it grace. Call it gravitas. It’s the thing that made him suitable to play a Vietnam soldier, in Da 5 Bloods, deemed by other black men to be “their Malcolm and their Martin”: It’s what eradicated any sense of inherent contradiction there. It’s the thing that made him as fluid with dad jokes, in Black Panther, as he was coasting through that movie’s Afrofuturist urbanscape and troubled political complexities. Boseman’s forays into history were tinged with fantasy, while his trips through the fantastical were earthbound, grounded in that enriched sense of history and responsibility he always carried with him. He was an actor who always seemed to be at the crossroads of competing expectations. And he made the negotiations of that work seem effortless.
Boseman was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer in 2016. Which means that Thurgood, T’Challa, “Malcolm and Martin” were all brought to life onscreen during his illness. His death arrived at the tail end of a summer overwhelmed by the bare fact of constant black death, a fact that had been spilling into the streets for months, in an outpouring of newly unchecked anger and grief. We hardly needed additional reminders of the precarity of black life, of the kind of unvarnished death that awaits the vast majority of us. And yet there it was: cancer.
The irony hits like a brick. Here we all are, black grievance hijacking the streets, taking hold of the public attention — all that history carrying us forward, at a moment when it seems someone has finally started to listen. Yet Boseman chose, at that moment, to do the opposite, to turn his grief inward — in part for us, to protect the heroic images he’s given us over the years from the cruel fact of his own mortality.
It was not my instinct after Boseman died to rewatch his star-making movies. Knowing now what lay beneath them, knowing the truth of the actor beyond the personas he slipped into and out of with grace, made it too hard to bear. Isn’t that the lesson? Boseman was, by all accounts, an intensely private man; with less celebrity, one imagines he would have handled his illness the same way: on his own terms.
Boseman must have known that despite all evidence to the contrary, it’s simply easier to believe — because we need it to be true — that heroes don’t die. He rendered history uncanny, undead. But rather than to the men he played, I find myself turning to the man himself. To the stories of his years at Howard, his love of the arts, his early seriousness on display. I turn to the photos of Chadwick, not T’Challa, easygoing and luxuriant of spirit, smiling and posing with the legions of young people who will never forget that they met Black Panther. I turn to the man and am forced to remember. And to say: Thank you.