The actor’s collaborators discuss his career in Chadwick Boseman: Portrait of an Artist.
“To be young, gifted, and Black, we all know what it’s like to be told that there is not a place for you to be featured. Yet, you are young, gifted, and Black. We know what it’s like to be told there’s not a screen for you to be featured on, a stage for you to be featured on. We know what it’s like to be the tail and not the head. We know what it’s like to be beneath and not above... [W]e knew that we had something special that we wanted to give the world, that we could be full human beings in the roles that we were playing, that we could create a world that exemplified a world that we wanted to see.”
That was Chadwick Boseman, invoking the lyrics of Nina Simone as he accepted the SAG Ensemble Award for Black Panther in 2019. By that time he’d brought some of the most towering historical figures to the screen — from Jackie Robinson to Thurgood Marshall to James Brown. In his portrayal of Levee in last year’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the actor approached the fictional character with as much reverence and commitment to authenticity as he gave to any of the larger-than-life heroes he’d become known for. It’s a beautifully singular interpretation of legendary playwright August Wilson’s work and it earned Boseman his first Oscar nomination.
In Chadwick Boseman: Portrait of an Artist (streaming on Netflix beginning April 17), Boseman’s collaborators discuss the impact he had through his life and through his work. Below is just a sampling of accolades from those who helped him bring his indelible performances to life in 42, Get On Up, Marshall, Black Panther, Da 5 Bloods, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.
“Some people have a concentrated dose of life. It’s like the old frozen orange juice that was in that little container and you have to put a gallon of water in it to make a quart of orange juice. Well, some people are that concentrated juice with no water in it. It’s too strong, it’s too good, it’s too powerful.”
Chadwick Boseman as Levee in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Photo courtesy of Netflix
“We would sit and have the longest, deepest conversations, to a point where I’d be like, ‘Chad, I don’t even know, it’s too deep for me.’ But they would be so profound just because of how he thought about life and everything very deeply — intellectually, spiritually, artistically. He always found a very deep reservoir to create from.”
“Chad was in casting, second person in, and when he left the room, I looked at [casting director] Vicki Thomas and she had her eyebrows raised like, What do you think of that? And I said, ‘Vicki, a movie star just walked out of this room.’ Everyone wants to talk about what a great actor Chad was — and he was, but he was something much rarer than that. He was a movie star. I needed that way more than I needed an actor, and I got both. There’s a quote I always responded to, which I’m going to paraphrase: ‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. And if you don’t bring forth what is within you, it will destroy you.’ I think that’s what Chad did. He brought forth everything that was within him and he put it out there and he gave it to us. He had a short time to do it and he did it.”
Chadwick Boseman as Jackie Robinson in 42
Photo courtesy of Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy
“Chadwick struggled with the idea of playing James Brown at first. He started with ‘I’m too tall.’ Then ‘I’m too good-looking!’ — of course — and then, ‘Look at my hands,’ or ‘I can’t dance.’ Then one day he comes up to me and he goes, ‘I had a dream last night that James Brown said to me, You’re going to do it. You’re going to do good, but you’re not going to do it as good as me.’ That dream stuck with him. A weight just went off his shoulders when he had that dream. And then, man, Chadwick Boseman became James Brown, whether you liked it or not, 24/7.”
Chadwick Boseman as James Brown in Get On Up
Photo courtesy of Universal / Courtesy Everett Collection
“When the music starts, how do you walk from point A to point B? How do I sit up from this chair? How do I sit down in it, depending on who I’m talking to? Chadwick understood that all of those things mattered, and he embraced them. Every project doesn’t require a choreographer, but Chadwick understood the importance of movement, and he would use it within and beyond the dance. Chadwick made me feel absolutely proud to be a choreographer.”
“When I got the script for Marshall, I was like, Well, there’s only one person to call. Who else could take on the gravity of this character and pull it off legitimately? I knew that it was Chadwick. And Chadwick, he was like, ‘Wow, I wasn’t planning on playing another historical character,’ and I said, ‘But do you like the script?’ and he goes, ‘Oh, the script is great.’ So I said, ‘Well, do you think a Thurgood Marshall movie should be made?’ He said ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Well if you say yes, it’ll get made, and if you don’t, it won’t.’ He said, ‘O.K., then I’ll do it.’ It wasn’t about his career. He was like, ‘For the greater good, this movie should exist.’ And that speaks to who he was as a man.”
Chadwick Boseman as Thurgood Marshall in Marshall
Photo courtesy of Entertainment Pictures / Alamy
“There was something about Chadwick where he looked different when he performed different roles. Watching him as T’Challa and then Levee in Ma Rainey? Before you were this superhero king, and now you’re the scrappy guy just trying to get somewhere in this America that does not work for you. It was just such a completely different person from anyone I’ve ever seen him play. Chadwick was always reaching deeper into something, into the spiritual realm.”
Chadwick Boseman as T’Challa in Black Panther
Photo courtesy of Alamy
“He went beyond the character brief that he was given at the very beginning. He dug deeper to find meaning behind each and every word and each and every line and each and every scene or every beat. He would say, ‘I don’t want people to watch this and see a beautiful movie or an amazing performance and walk away from it. I want it to be impactful in some way.’”
“Schedules are very funny and we were like five, six weeks into [shooting Da 5 Bloods] before our brother Chadwick got there. And so he just had like a week or maybe even three or four days of bootcamp. We were a tight, tight unit and brother man just slid on in there like he had been there from the get-go. I don’t think he rehearsed with the actors because there just wasn’t time. But he was a prepared, total professional. He was one of the Bloods. He was Stormin’ mother-f***ing Norman, excuse my profanity. And that’s why I cast him, because he just had this weight, this aura.”
Chadwick Boseman as Stormin’ Norman in Da 5 Bloods
Photo courtesy of Netflix
“A lot of the time on set, Chadwick would come over to me and share Levee’s judgments of the world, Levee’s judgments of Ma Rainey, Levee’s judgments of Dussie Mae. He would come talk to me as Levee, he would talk to me about who Levee was and who Levee wasn’t. And I got to hear his judgments about all the other characters that he [as Levee] had to deal with in the room: who he thought had talent, who didn’t, who he wanted to start a band with and who he didn’t, which was really fascinating and fun.”
“He was so thoughtful about everything that came out of his mouth. Everything was so intentional. Everything mattered. There was no moment missed. It was like, I got to get to the truth and I got to find it now. If it’s done with love, it’ll work. And love is truth and truth is love, and that’s just how it’s got to be. When he talked to you, he was talking to you in the present — right there, this is all that exists. I felt like he was so much more spirit than body, and I hope to live like spirit, always, each step with spirit. I think that if we all lived with that kind of care and intentionality and purpose, but also soul — it’s more soul than anything else — maybe we’d have a shot at this place being a place of paradise.”
Chadwick Boseman as Levee in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Photo courtesy of Netflix
“Even when they would have breaks, resetting a stage or something, Chadwick was always playing the cornet, playing the stuff that he had learned. It didn’t sound very good, because in a movie you can learn how to play a trumpet in two months but in real life it takes 10 years. But every note he played was the right note. It’s not like he was going to finish the movie and then go do gigs. The fact that I’m listening to an actor play the cornet and I can tell which notes they are and the fingerings are correct? I was like, Man, this kid is crazy!”
“Chadwick was one of those actors that scares you because you know you have to step up when you’re in his presence, that he is going to go a hundred percent. He just is, you feel it. He’s looking at your work and he’s like, I have to believe you in order to believe myself, in order to believe we are in this world. Every once in a while, someone comes in, they only come along once in a lifetime. The rest of us scramble for half of our lives thinking, We did not listen to that inner voice. Not one single time. And that’s all he did.”