Lupita Nyong’o Pays Tribute to ‘Black Panther’ Star Chadwick Boseman

Lupita Nyong’o teared up paying tribute to her “Black Panther” co-star Chadwick Boseman during a BFI London Film Festival Q&A about her career.

After organizers played a clip from the 2018 film, in which Nyong’o starred as Nakia opposite Boseman’s T’Challa, the Oscar-winning actor admitted, “I haven’t seen the film since Chadwick died” before welling up. As Nyong’o struggled to speak, the moderator offered to move on to talking about her next film but Nyong’o declined, taking a minute to compose herself before continuing.

“The grief is just the love,” she said. “There’s no place to put it. I don’t run away from the tears or the grief. You just live with it.”

Boseman died from colon cancer in 2020 at the age of 43.

Nyong’o revealed that she had actually been in talks to star in another Marvel movie, which she didn’t name, when her agent told her that “Black Panther” director Ryan Coogler was interested in her for the role of Nakia.

“So I got on the phone with Ryan, and he walked me through this story about this fictional African country, and his idea of making it even more politically astute and relevant than the comic book that it was based off of,” Nyong’o recalled. “And when he finished, I said, ‘Wait – this is a Marvel movie? This is Disney?’ And he’s like, Yeah. And I’m like, ‘Is this your wish or is this what they [agreed to]?’ And he was like, ‘No, no, no, they’re on board!”

“So I knew from the beginning, we’re onto something incredible,” she continued. “And if they let us do this thing, if we get away with it, it’s gonna be amazing.”

Nyong’o said that there had been “a lot of fear, definitely from the executives — Marvel was shaking a little bit in their boots” as the film neared its release date. “And then the trailer dropped, and we were like ‘Whaaaat this is huge!’ I remember we were in a group chat. We were sharing memes and [saying] look at how the world is responding.”

The film went on to break the $1 billion barrier globally in just 26 days.

As Nyong’o further reflected on working with Boseman, she said: “I don’t know whether I’ll ever be done shedding my tears from losing my friend, but I’m also like, wow, we get to see him [in the film]. We get to see him alive. And that’s so wonderful.”

During the talk, which spanned her career beginning with her feature film debut in “12 Years a Slave” as well as her childhood in Kenya, Nyong’o revealed that the year before she won her supporting actress Oscar in 2014, she had watched the ceremony at home in her pyjamas.

“Until I went to drama school I’d never watched the Oscars,” she divulged, adding with a laugh: “And then at drama school we started to have parties where we’d dress up and sip on champagne as we watched the Oscars, and like, judge people’s clothes and stuff.”

Her win made her one of only ten Black women to have ever won an acting Oscar, a fact that Nyong’o is acutely aware of. “It was really surreal,” she said of her win. “And then learning about the history — Hattie McDaniel and how she had to come through the back [entrance] and all that — it was just like, wow, it’s hard to wrap my head around what that meant.”

“So to be a part of that, of course, means a lot to me as a Black woman, as an immigrant.”

Nyong’o was at the BFI London Film Festival to promote her latest film, animated feature “The Wild Robot,” in which she plays the lead. The actor revealed she injured her vocal cords while recording the voice, which was inspired by “relentlessly positive” AI assistants like Siri and Alexa.”

“That was quite difficult to sustain,” she said. “I was doing it often and at one point I actually injured my voice, I developed a polyp and had to remain silent for three months in order to heal.”