The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
A journey from Michonne to Okoye
No stranger to playing tough character, Gurira of ‘Walking Dead’ still had to train
On “The Walking Dead,” Danai Gurira’s character, Michonne, swings a pretty mean Japanese katana sword.
As “Black Panther’s” Okoye, though, Gurira had to learn a whole new manner of fighting. As the bodyguard of Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa, the title superhero and king of the mythical African nation Wakanda, Okoye is also the leader of its all-female special forces, called the Dora Milaje, and serves in other important military capacities.
It looks like training for the action-packed yet supremely graceful performance, which often involved intricate synchronization with the women playing Okoye’s sister Doras, required learning a lot of different moves from Gurira’s TV job.
“It did. Oh, very much so,” the Iowa-born, Zimbabwe-raised actress says. “Ryan Coogler had a very clear vision of how we all fought and how we fought differently from each other. There’s a way Panther fought versus a way Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) fought versus the way the Dora Milaje fought versus the way that Killmonger” (the film’s antagonist from America, played by Michael B. Jordan) “fought. Everyone had a particular way of combat.
“That was a long part of training,” said Gurira, sporting an elegant camel hair coat and super-short, pattern-carved hair. “We were in a very intense boot camp with that, and it was really kind of awesome ... and intense. Our stunt guys, fight choreographers and fight coordinators, they’re a really skilled bunch of guys. And the Dora Milaje, there were stuntwomen in there who were also helping us train. The Dora Milaje was really comprised of stuntwomen. There were a couple of
dancers in there, and even some ladies who were circus performers. So it was an amazing array of ability, but it was a lot of intense training.”
We believe her. When she wasn’t at boot camp under the watchful eyes
of veteran Marvel movie stunt coordinators Andy Gill and Jonathan Eusebio, Gurira continued practicing. Learning to handle the Doras’ long fighting staff — enhanced in Marvel movies and comics by the meteoric metal vibranium, which is
the source of Wakanda’s wealth and technical innovations (and, incidentally, Captain America’s shield) — took particular effort.
“A lot of work went into the choreography,” she says. “Sometimes I’d be at home and I would drop my staff, and the woman living underneath me would be like, ‘Um, are you dropping something on the floor?’ And I’d be like, ‘It was just my feet,’ and she’d go, ‘No, it’s not your feet; it’s a thing!’ I’d just say, ‘Look, I’m not trying to drop it. If I drop it, it means I messed up, so trust me, I’m not trying to drop it.’ You had to keep focused and keep going.”
The very distinctive Dora look also contributed to how Gurira defined Okoye in motion.
“I loved the idea that these women are bald, they have these amazing tattoos on their head, and they have a red lip, they have the very beautiful costume/uniform, and there’s a combination of grace and femininity with their ferocity,” she says. “That combination working so potently, I thought, was really beautiful, and it allowed me to really understand how she would move.”
Shaving her head to play Okoye, however, required a leap of faith.
“I grew to embrace it, but initially ... I’ve had short short hair many times, but I had a ‘fro at the time, and I’d grown it out nice and big,” Gurira says. “So it was a shock. And there’s a big difference between even this and completely bald — a big, big difference. So it was an adjustment period. But then it really became the solidarity that comes with 10 other women walking into the room bald. Then you really start to embrace the cool specificity of that, how we’re bringing a unique image to the world. That was really thrilling.”
Gurira will bring that image back this spring when she returns as Okoye in Marvel’s” Avengers: Infinity War.”