How much did you know about Black Panther going into “Captain America: Civil War”?
I mainly knew the Reginald Hudlin run on “Black Panther,” and I knew the original Jack Kirby-Stan Lee version. So, so good. Reading for the movie, though, I basically tried to cover everything. Going over the original versions, Hudlin, the Christopher Priest versions … I read as much as I could at the time. Pretty extensive research.
Did you come away from that with a favorite moment in the comics?
I love the battles with Killmonger in Christopher Priest’s [run]. I love any complex story that makes you think, not to be too specific. Any time he makes you think he lost when he actually won -- that’s my favorite aspect of the character. There’s one moment when he was fighting Mephisto, and he basically lures him into a den where his ancestors, who were all Panthers, were there. So he’s fighting with his ancestors behind him. That’s one of my favorites and a beautiful moment.
Is it hard to turn the accent on and off? And what is it based on?
Is it hard? No, it’s not necessarily hard to turn it on and off. Any time you’re using an accent you want to speak in that accent as much as you can, and I think when you stop doing the character, you just get away from the accent. I’m not in a place where we’re actually shooting, so I don’t generally walk around going into restaurants speaking in the accent. But every once in a while, if I can go to a place where people don’t recognize me or I’m in disguise, I might try stuff out. That’s how you stay fresh with it.
As far as where it comes from, obviously, it’s a fictional African country, but I wanted to base it in reality. I had done a movie before “Civil War” called “Message from the King,” and I’d gone to South Africa a couple of times for research and for filming that movie. While I was there, I found a dialect coach, same coach I’m using now for “Civil War.” It’s primarily based in the Xhosa dialect, but it’s not that. He had extensive knowledge of various places.
We looked at specific people from Kenya, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone — which is actually where my ancestors are from — but I wanted to use whatever would inspire me for certain sounds. That added to it. Because we now have Danai [Gurira] and Lupita [Nyong’o] who have a more direct connection to the continent; they will bring their own flavor to what’s done. I’ll be listening to them and listening to what they do and continuing to create, because again, this is a fictional thing but you want it to feel real.
For me, Wakanda has never been conquered. So I wanted to make sure that he didn’t speak like ... well, at one time they were thinking he’d have a European accent or an American accent. I said that would not be fine because if we did that, that would be saying that they had been colonized. That was something that I wanted to make sure happened, that we stuck to that in the character.