Article Lead Image

Photo via Disney | ABC Television Group/Flickr

Lupita Nyong’o is in talks to star in ‘Black Panther,’ and fans are freaking out

Let this be true!

Photo of Michelle Jaworski 

Michelle Jaworski

Internet Culture

Posted on May 12, 2016   Updated on May 26, 2021, 7:10 pm CDT

Lupita Nyong’o already joined that galaxy far, far away, but now it looks as though she’ll soon have the Marvel Cinematic Universe under her belt.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Nyong’o is in talks to star in Black Panther alongside Chadwick Boseman, who debuted as T’challa in Captain America: Civil War. Creed director Ryan Coogler is set to direct.

Although Marvel has yet to officially confirm the news, the sheer possibility of a Boseman/Nyong’o/Coogler-led Black Panther is enough for many fans online to start celebrating.

https://twitter.com/nerdfromaustria/status/730814297014697984

https://twitter.com/theSTASHED/status/730816335882649600

https://twitter.com/mousterpiece/status/730809348327276544

It’s unknown which character Nyong’o will play in Black Panther, but The Hollywood Reporter said she would be the Black Panther’s love interest.

The Black Panther movie has decades of story to pull from, as well as the current run by Ta-Nehisi Coates, so there are a few possibilities as to which character Nyong’o could portray in the movie.

For instance, she could play a member of the Dora Milaje, the group of bodyguards who protect T’Challa and the ruling family of Wakanda; we saw one of them with T’Challa in Civil War. Birth. Movies. Death’s Devin Faraci mentions Okoye as a possibility. (Or even a Dora Milaje from Coates’s run.)

Monica Lynne, a jazz musician who is in an on-and-off relationship with T’Challa, could be another possibility; they were even engaged at one point. But that might require some fleshing out by Coogler. Nyong’o wrote in an essay for Lenny Letter last week that she’s not interested in playing a one-note character and wants to participate in developing the roles she chooses.

“I think sometimes a singular catharsis can be found in genre storytelling—as I found when playing a thousand-year-old woman (Maz Kanata in Star Wars: The Force Awakens) and a wolf mother (Raksha in The Jungle Book),” she wrote. “I’m able to be more engaged in roles such as those than I would be in playing ‘the wife’ when she is written with no motivation or singularity.”

Some are hoping that she’ll play Monica Rambeau, a superhero known as Spectrum who at one point went by Captain Marvel—something that would probably be left out with Carol Danvers’s Captain Marvel set to star in her own movie in 2019.

T’Challa’s best known love interest by far is Ororo Munroe, which fans will know better as Storm. But bringing her in would present its own problems. Fox owns the movie rights to her, not Disney and Marvel Studios, so Marvel wouldn’t be able to just place her in the film. It’s not impossible, seeing how it was finally able to bring Spider-Man over to the MCU, but Fox already has successful film franchises with X-Men and Deadpool so there is likely less motivation to share one of its characters with Marvel.

Still, just imagine what could be.

https://twitter.com/MatthewACherry/status/730145441988235268

Whoever it is, we know we’re already on-board.

H/T The Hollywood Reporter

Share this article
*First Published: May 12, 2016, 6:24 pm CDT

Michelle Jaworski

Michelle Jaworski is a staff writer and TV/film critic at the Daily Dot. She covers entertainment, geek culture, and pop culture and has covered everything from the Sundance Film Festival, NYFF, and Tribeca to New York Comic Con and Con of Thrones. She is based in Brooklyn.

Michelle Jaworski