Ryan Coogler Explains Why Recasting T’Challa in ‘Wakanda Forever Was Never Really An Option

“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” hits theaters next Friday and closes out Phase 4 of the MCU. But Ryan Coogler‘s sequel to his 2018 film is highly anticipated for several reasons. First, the film sees Tenoch Huerta bring Namor, one of the original Marvel Comics heroes, onto the big screen for the first time. The film also introduces other comic favorites like Dominique Thorne‘s Riri Williams/Ironhart to the MCU.

READ MORE: New ‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’ Clips & Mini-Trailer: Wakanda Faces Off Against Namor On November 11

And on a more serious note, it’s a “Black Panther“ film without T’Challa himself, Chadwick Boseman, and fans want to see how Coogler handles the tragic death of Chadwick Boseman in the upcoming film. Boseman passed away on August 28, 2020 after a long battle with colon cancer, forcing Coogler to take a different direction for “Wakanda Forever.” On the first episode of the “Wakanda Forever: The Official Black Panther Podcast,” hosted by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Coogler opened up about whether or not he considered recasting the role of T’Challa after Boseman’s death. Ultimately, Coogler knew he couldn’t even replace Boseman with another actor, leading him to create a different “Wakanda Forever” than he originally intended.

“You consider everything when something like this happens,” Coogler told Coates about the possibility of recasting the part of T’Challa. “It’s like, ‘I don’t think I can come back and make another one,’ ‘I don’t think I can do this,’ ‘I don’t think there should be another movie,’ you go through all of the extremes.” But then the director gave a long and thoughtful answer as to why it wasn’t possible, emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically for everyone involved to make a “Black Panther” sequel with a different actor in the starring role. As Coogler put it, Boseman was the “truth” of Black Panther, and they could not ignore the reality of what happened.

“For me to say we considered recasting as an option, that’s a complicated thing even to say,” he explained. “Because, like, with these movies, just like my job as a director, I don’t think people fully appreciate a job that is not their own. But the true day-to-day of my job is several hundred days of long days of getting other professionals to believe in ideas I find truthful. That’s what my job is. I have to believe in something enough to go convince other professionals to believe in it as well for an extended period of time. And the moment I stop believing what I’m doing, whatever end product that I am putting out is cooked. It’s done. It has to be truthful for me. And if there’s any element of ‘nope,’ for me, in the process, it’s my job to weed that out.”

“My truth is Chadwick is gone from the physical sense; he wasn’t walking through that door,” he continued. “And the world that we created over the years, he was the guy. So for someone else to be him—for us in the world that we created—we wouldn’t have believed it. No matter how good the actor was, no matter, it would have been lacking the necessary truth for us to do a good job. And truth is the well we pull from as artists. Our truth was lost, which is a fact of life; it’s the gift and curse of life. Heroes and great men die.”

That’s why “Wakanda Forever” takes place after T’Challa’s death, with the secret African nation mourning him as Namor emerges as a threat. Irate that T’Challa revealed Wakanda’s existence to the world at the end of “Black Panther,” Namor, the leader of the undersea kingdom of Talokan, decides to take matters into his own hands against the surface world. Without their leader, Wakanda must band together to protect themselves and the rest of the world from Namor’s aggression.

In the wake of Boseman’s death, “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” is bound to be one of the heaviest Marvel movies to date, emotionally speaking. Only eight days left before the film hits theaters on November 11.