‘When you are on the pitch playing a game, you have to deafen your ears to what the crowd is saying,” offers Lupita Nyong’o, her voice soft and pondering.
“You cannot listen to the boos, and you cannot listen to the cheers either, because both those things will derail you from what you’re trying to do. The job is to just hold on to the ball when it comes to you and to hold on to it for as long as you need to before you deliver it to where it needs to go.”
This is a football analogy the Academy Award-winning actress adopted from Black Panther director, Ryan Coogler and an outlook she leads with when it comes to pressure. And, starring in a film of this magnitude (not just financially, but symbolically), there must have been plenty of it.
But that pressure has made diamonds.
Over the past week or so, Black Panther has obliterated the notion that films with a predominantly black cast are inherently unable to bring in big numbers at the box office and reach a global audience.
It’s been a whirlwind of a roll-out for Nyong’o and her co-stars.
Sitting next to her, Danai Gurira, the Zimbabwean-American actress who plays a fierce Wakandan warrior named Okoye, shares her theory on how they deal with the pressure of all the hype,
“To an extent, we were born ready,” she laughs. But, she’s serious. “You know, literally we’ve been in a struggle our whole lives, you know what I mean? You are in a world where the aesthetic is not about you. The perspective is not about you.
“The idea of how stories are told or where they are told from is never from things that look familiar to you. So all of our lives as artists have been spent pushing for these types of narratives to come to the fore and wanting to be a part of them and making it very clear that this is who we are.”
Black Panther appears to have assumed a responsibility that goes beyond simple entertainment. To many, the kingdom of Wakanda is a reflection of the peace, unity and self-sustainability that would’ve reigned on the continent were it not for colonisation.
By and large, Black Panther is a mockery of Hollywood’s dated conventions. For once, a Hollywood blockbuster uplifts African pride and black women aren’t portrayed in a negative light - instead, they are embraced as heroes through the battalion of women warriors called the Dora Milaje (Interestingly, the king’s younger sister, Shuri, is purported to be the smartest Marvel superhero of all-time.)
Importantly, the African references in Black Panther aren’t corny, and there’s a beautiful sincerity about many of them. A scene where Okoye hurls a wig at a villain during combat has resonated with many black people.
“I had no idea that this moment would resonate as it seems to have ,” says Gurira.
“It gave a very alternative perspective on beauty aesthetics and the way she wasn’t happy with it on her head from the jump and she’s proud of her bald head this is her cultural aesthetic.”
Gurira tells of how a black British girl recently shared how potent the scene was to her, “she was like, ‘she’d (Okoye) never been colonised, so she didn’t feel the need to do anything different with how she wore her hair.”
Wardrobe and hair plays a huge role in the authenticity of the movie. Ruth Carter was the costume designer and Camille Friend the hair designer.
“They went to town on research on real African influences, so all our costumes are inspired by actual African cultures,” adds Nyong’o.
Nyong’o tells of a powerful off-camera moment during the shooting of a scene where the king gets coronetted, “we were all there and we were stuck on these cliffs between takes and the drummers started to drum just to entertain us. And they started drumming to Snoop Dogg’s Drop It Like It’s Hot.
The entire crowd, all of us, know that song and we started to riff to it. We all started doing that sound (she mimics the sound). It was so much fun. I realised that it took a pan-African cast and crew to make this happen.
We had African people from everywhere. It was just pan-Africanism personified.”
One of the unique challenges Nyong’o and the rest of the foreign cast faced was language.
“The Xhosa language is one of the hardest languages on the planet. But I love it for that and how specific and unique and beautiful it is. That’s what we’ve always wanted to do, to delve into African specificity.”