Spotlight on actor Chadwick Boseman in Marshall
The versatile actor stars in another biopic
THE 40-year-old American is cornering the market on playing real-life legends – Chadwick has portrayed American baseball legend Jackie Robinson in the movie 42 (2013) as well as king of soul James Brown in Get On Up (2014). He’s also been the superhero Black Panther in Captain America: Civil War, and will reprise that role in a standalone film that’s set for release early next year.
But before he tackles supervillains in the Marvel universe, he’s playing yet another real-life figure in Marshall, about Thurgood Marshall, who in 1967 became the first African-American judge to sit on the bench of the US supreme court. Marshall, a hero of the US civil rights movement, died in 1993.
The movie is set in 1940 and revisits the judge’s early years, when he was an idealistic young attorney defending a terrified black chauffeur (This Is Us Emmy winner Sterling K Brown) who’s accused of the rape and attempted murder of his white employer.
Chadwick told BuzzFeed website he feels blessed to have Marshall is in cinemas now worked with Sterling. “There was a period of time where it would only be one [main black actor in a movie]. It’d be Denzel [Washington] in this movie, it’d be [Laurence] Fishburne in that movie, Sam Jackson in that movie, and Morgan Freeman in this one. [There were] very few opportunities where you would see them working together.” Now, Chadwick says, he can do “a movie with Michael B Jordan (they star in Black Panther) and it’s okay. It doesn’t even have to be such a big deal because the opportunities aren’t so scarce. And that’s an important moment to note.”