When someone 43 years old dies of cancer, it’s tragic. But when that person is Chadwick Boseman, the word tragic doesn’t fully express it. It’s beyond tragic — it’s cosmically cruel. You feel as if…
, the word tragic doesn’t fully express it. It’s beyond tragic — it’s cosmically cruel. You feel as if the shock of his loss has ripped a hole in the world. Boseman was a virtuoso actor who had the rare ability to create a character from the outside inthe inside out.
Boseman knew how to fuse with a role, etching it in three dimensions, bringing it his own truth. That’s what made him an artist, and a movie star, too. Yet in “,” he also became that rare thing, a culture hero — not simply because he incarnated Hollywood’s first larger-than-life Black comic-book superhero of the franchise era, but because he made him such an earthly and tangible human being.
His performance as T’Challa isn’t like other actors’ comic-book-film performances. It’s deft and sly and vulnerable, with that singsong accent that lends a note of pensive play to everything he says. And because he infused the character with such a miraculously relatable spirit, Boseman touched a generation. He created a new kind of hero, and in doing so he showed us what was possible — andwhat was possible. He blazed a liberating trail of hope and connection.
Boseman had incredible taste in roles, which is one reason his resume is short and sweet. It was all wheat, very little chaff. But it’s telling to look at the performance he gave in “21 Bridges,” a garish pulp crime thriller that came out at the end of last year , because it’s not on the level of those other films, so you get to see the personality that Boseman brought to a role when it wasn’t richly imagined — in this case, he was tense and cautious, with jagged bursts of bravado.
The sky would seriously have been the limit for him. I’m sad he never had a great romantic role, because I think it would have deepened his image. Yet when you think of Chadwick Boseman and what might have been, part of what’s so wrenching about his loss is that it comes at a moment when the entertainment industry is grappling, in powerful ways, with its legacy of racism, and is attempting to open new doors.
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