November 22, 2024
Danai Gurira speaks out
DANAI Gurira is already well known to genre fans as the sword-wielding zombie decapitator Michonne in TV’s The Walking Dead.
She’s about to be become even better known as royal warrior Okoye in Black Panther, the Afrocentric new Disney/Marvel Studios movie which is set to do some mind-splitting of its own this weekend.
Backed by powerful buzz for its blockbuster depiction of Black valour and culture, the film is on track to topple cinematic stereotypes about race and gender — and also February box office records, with a North American opening expected between $145 million and $170 million (U.S.).
Black Panther is the first major superhero movie starring an almost entirely Black cast, many of them women in key roles. It’s co-written and directed by African-American filmmaker Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station, Creed).
“It’s breaking into some imagery and breaking some barriers that we really need to see broken, honestly,” says Gurira, just turned 40, during a recent Toronto promotional visit.
“It’s setting a precedent to put this type of story, from this particular perspective, on the main stage of film. And I think it’s something that’s being celebrated by all demographics. I’ve had so much excitement coming from not just people of colour, but from everybody. They’re finding a connection to celebrating this film and feeling very excited about it.
“The world is much more ready than I guess some people in the past have thought, to see large movies on this scale come from various perspectives.”
Gurira’s General Okoye heads the Dora Milaje, an elite all-female warrior squad tasked with protecting the throne of the film’s mythical Wakanda. It’s a technologically advanced African nation, long hidden from the world as a security measure, ruled by Chadwick Boseman’s King T’Challa, whose alter-ego is the masked action hero known as Black Panther.
Okoye stands ready to defend the throne at all times, even when she’s wearing a long red dress for a casino espionage scene. The fancy attire is no impediment to her martial arts moves and lethal skill with a spear.
Black Panther isn’t just beautiful — it’s got brains to spare
“I love the fact that this was scripted this way,” says Gurira, who still sports her character’s fierce shaved hairstyle, paired for the interview with a bold print outfit.
“It was very specific that she had this flowy red dress on. I loved how it combined ferocity with femininity. The Dora Milaje, and my character, they have this fantastic combination of being fierce and feminine. There’s no compromise from one to the other. I think sometimes in this world we’re taught there has to be, and I love how the women of Wakanda totally flip that on its head.”
The multilingual Gurira is used to shattering expectations and mixing metaphors. She was born in a small town in Iowa, but at the age of 5 moved to Harare, Zimbabwe, the home country of her immigrant parents, one a professor and the other a university librarian.
When she moved back to America to attend college, eventually studying for a master of fine arts degree from New York University, Gurira combined her love of acting with another career, that of playwright. She has since written six staged plays, including Eclipsed, a 2009 hostage drama set in Liberia and starring her eventual Black Panther co-star Lupita Nyong’o.
Anybody who knows Gurira strictly from her powerful screen appearances — which include acclaimed early work in The Visitor, Tom McCarthy’s celebrated 2007 immigrant drama — may be surprised to learn that she’s as devoted to writing for the stage as she is to acting for film and TV.
“I’m still a playwright; it’s nothing I’ve grown out of!” she says, laughing.
“There’s nothing to reconcile. I guess it’s just who I am. I don’t know any other me. You know what I mean? I’ve always been athletic and really into active stuff since I was a kid in Zimbabwe . . .
“And then I got (the role of) Michonne and I was like, oh, OK, careful what you wish for because here she is! And so, really, I got to step into a character who was very agile, very able, a little bit superhuman in terms of her abilities. And then I got stepped into Okoye and, I mean, it’s really exciting. It all seems like a part of who I am, quite authentically.”
She has a lot more to say, about Black Panther, The Walking Dead and a certain carrot-topped world leader with a very parochial world view:
Q: I guess the movie had to be called Black Panther, in keeping with Marvel Comics naming tradition, but Wakanda might have been a better choice. It’s about a whole nation of people and their way of life.
Danai: That’s what’s so exciting. There is a celebration and an introduction to this nation and one that we all wish — certainly I as an African — certainly wish it did exist. And it’s a celebration of great diversity on the continent as well and of the people. You’re right: so many people in this movie are very interesting, varied, complex and self-possessed. I especially love the women characters. They got to play very complex and interesting multi-dimensional women, so there is something very powerful about getting to know Wakanda, this place that was never colonized, what then became of it? And this is what became of it.
Q: Black Panther is certainly a different kind of superhero origin story.
Danai: This is kind of Wakanda’s coming-out story. It has to come out, yeah! That’s something that, as colonized peoples, we always wondered who we would have been had we not been colonized. Because colonization is a very massive onslaught, an assault, and it changes the DNA of a cultural identity. And what could it have been outside of that?
Q: The opposing characters played by Chadwick Boseman and Michael B. Jordan are also not the typical hero vs. villain dynamic. They both want to advance Black people, but the former chooses peaceful methods and the latter choose revolutionary ones.
Danai: It’s rare to see two Black characters go up against each other, and it’s true: it’s very ideological and it’s very complex; it’s not simply good and evil. There’s a very complex response to experiences both have had and to the state of the world that we’re in.
Q) It’s been fascinating to watch Ryan Coogler go from his indie feature debut Fruitvale Station at Sundance in 2013, which also starred Michael B. Jordan, to helming a Marvel blockbuster five years later.
Danai: Funnily, Ryan saw a film I starred in there, Mother of George. He had never seen The Walking Dead. I was like, how am I getting this (Black Panther) offer? He loved me from Mother of George. It was at Sundance the same year as Fruitvale, so it’s crazy how things come back around.
Q) What do you make of your character Okoye and her response to the threats to the Wakandan throne in Black Panther?
Danai: Well, she’s loyal to the throne . . . but I liken it to people who have to see their presidency changed. When we were shooting this, it was early 2017. What happens when that big picture on the wall changes out?
Q) You’re referring to Donald Trump becoming U.S. president in early 2017. What do you think of his recent comment about not wanting to admit immigrants from “s—hole countries,” a general slur that included African nations?
Danai: I don’t think about what Donald Trump thinks! Listen, all I know is Africa is full of great potential, it’s full of great people, it’s full of great ability. I’m the child of African immigrants who came to the United States. One of whom got a PhD, the other one has two master’s degrees. So I come from the realm where I see the power and the abilities of Africans all the time. I was just in Zimbabwe, and I was observing Zimbabwean playwrights create astounding, interesting, dynamic and powerful narratives. I’m constantly invigorated whenever I go back to the continent and encounter the people who are doing amazing things. . . .
What I do love about this movie is that it celebrates so much variety in the continent. It pulls from so many beautiful sources to create the design of the movie. You get to hear an African language. You get to hear African music.
We pulled from real African places: the bead work, the jewelry, the skirts around our waists — and the spear! Everything is based on actual representation out of the continent, which often is not celebrated or exposed.
Q) I have to ask a question for Walking Dead fans: can you offer any hints as to where the romance between Michonne and Rick is going?
Danai: They take it day by day, second by second. They are very much in love and committed to each other. They’re partners and they get each other, and they work beautifully together — as they did long before they got together and now even more so. I love The Walking Dead and I love Black Panther. I get to do the things I love and that’s really exciting.
Q) I’d like to see a Marvel spinoff movie where the Dora Milaje of Black Panther and the Amazons of Wonder Woman team up.
Danai: We should set you up with some meetings! You can pitch these ideas!
(This interview was edited and condensed.)
Peter Howell is the Star’s movie critic. His column usually runs Fridays.
