Ahead of the launch of Marvel’s Avengers War for Wakanda expansion, I had the opportunity to chat with T’Challa himself, Christopher Judge, and narrative consultant Evan Narcisse to find out what it was like to bring a new Black Panther to our screens. With Judge’s previous powerhouse performance as Kratos in 2018’s God of War combining with Narcisse’s many connections to Marvel – including writing his own Rise of the Black Panther comic book run and working with Insomniac on PS5 launch hit Spider-Man: Miles Morales – it appears a match made in heaven.
It’s a project that both seem to have enjoyed greatly, despite feeling a certain amount of pressure to “get it right” due to the personal connection of the character to both. Here, we talk about what that process was like, get to know this new T’Challa, and what you can expect from War for Wakanda when it drops on August 17th:
IGN: What does the character of Black Panther mean to each of you?
Christopher Judge [CJ]: It’s the first character I ever identified with, the first “superhero” that I ever identified with. It’s kind of the first character that allowed me to dream of greatness, to be great, to dream of things that weren’t the status quo and that it was okay to do so. It was okay to be intellectually brilliant. It was okay to be all of these things that weren’t necessarily being portrayed in any form of media back then. So it really holds a very special place to me.
IGN: He’s a character that over the last few years has just got bigger and bigger in the public consciousness, obviously because of the MCU films. How exciting is it for you to bring your own spin to that character, now he’s as big as he’s ever been?
CJ: It’s incredibly terrifying. With everything that I portray, I’m fine once I’m done. I know I put my all into it and then it’s left to things I can’t control. It’s important to me that people like this character. It’s important to me that people love and are inspired by this character because that’s who he was and is for me. It was much more personal than anything else I’ve ever done.
Evan Narcisse [EN]: I mean, it’s like you said, this character has become a global phenomenon in the last couple of years. I’d even go before the movie, the fact that you can get someone like Ta-Nehisi Coates to write the comic book adventures of this character is a watershed moment. I’m biased, he’s my friend, but it still means something that you can think “oh, here’s somebody who’s made a name for himself writing about history and culture and politics and at a very high level.” You’ve got presidents reading his writing.
Then he says, “but you know what? I’m actually going to f**k around and write these comics too.” That’s meaningful because it says that superhero comics as a genre, as a form, can hold some of these same serious weighty existential questions about what it means to govern, what it means to hold power, what it means to hold onto your culture. He explored all of that through those comics and the movie did the same thing.
We did kind of lean on the same subtext of the character as kind of an anti colonialist superhero. What AIM and Klaw are trying to do with the campaign is a form of colonialism.
What happens as a character evolves – and I’d really start that evolution at the 1998 series written by Christopher Priest – is that you realize that he’s able to embody and Wakanda as a fictional construct is able to embody all these different ideas and questions and explorations about blackness, the black diaspora, colonialism and its legacies, all that stuff. Hopefully, the game touches on some of that too.
We did kind of lean on the same subtext of the character as kind of an anti colonialist superhero. What AIM and Klaw are trying to do with the campaign is a form of colonialism. It’s not all that different from coming in and stealing diamonds, coming in and stealing Vibranium is similar and what it means to face that kind of a threat is something we try to explore in the story.
IGN: Chris, similarly to how you did with Kratos, you’re stepping into a role here where people have this preconceived voice for this character. Chadwick is a voice everyone associates with Black Panther. How do you approach this sort of role? Do you take inspiration or you just try and go completely new with it?
CJ: I said from the outset that this had to be my interpretation of it, not only because of Chadwick’s towering sweeping portrayal, but also this is a different media. This is a different take on it and it’s not at the same stage in T’Challa’s life as the movie was. It had to be approached for me differently. He’s been ensconced as king for a long time, he’s secure in himself, secure in his position, revels in who he is and who and what his country and people are. It, for me, had to be my honest and kind of unfettered interpretation of it. So I just approached it from square one and it had to live as that and hopefully people enjoy it.
IGN: How did that differ from the way you approached Kratos? Was it a fresh start?
CJ: Absolutely. The first thing I did was lose weight because the previous character I played was a big hulking and so, I put on probably 25, 30 pounds of muscle probably. So I tried to strip all of that away in a very short time, not all of it, but I wanted him to be life and agile. And to me, for my instrument to also sound like that, I kind of had to physically be it, so that was along with learning the dialect.
I got more agile, so did the lyrical quality of my voice. It really explored different parts of my vocal instrument than I previously ever have.
Those two kind of went hand in hand and as I got more agile, so did the lyrical quality of my voice. It really explored different parts of my vocal instrument than I previously ever have. So it was a whole new experience for me.
IGN: We’re obviously living in strange times at the moment to say the least. Were you able to go into the studio and perform this role or was some of it recorded from home or remotely?
CJ: All from home.Well, no, that’s not true. We’d have a few sessions in the studio, but the bulk of it was from home. So it gave me an excuse to have a dedicated home office and studio, which I had been wanting to do for a decade. This gave me an irrefutable reason to actually happen.
IGN: Evan, Chris kind of touched on it there with the stage of life that we find T’Challa at the start of this story. Can you just give a brief introduction to this T’Challa?
EN: Yeah, so this isn’t a coming of age story. This isn’t an origin story. He’s been king, he’s been Black Panther for a while, and he’s confident in his abilities. Like Chris said, he’s been saying all that he’s self-assured and his sense of himself and his sense of Wakanda’s capabilities when it comes to protecting its own borders.
Initially when this threat presents itself, T’Challa thinks, yeah, we got this, we can handle it. It proves to be more persistent than he had planned for, but still, I think even when the Avengers come knocking on the doorstep, he’s like, “We got this, but let’s see what you guys can do. I mean, you came all this way. I’m not going to make you turn around and go back. So let’s see what happens if we let you help us and not, oh, come please save us!”
This isn’t an origin story. He’s been king, he’s been Black Panther for a while, and he’s confident in his abilities.
He’s more aloof, he’s more standoffish, he’s less open to collaboration as a ruler because he hasn’t needed to avail himself of those options up until this point. He’s very much, I think, more self-assured and maybe a little bit overconfident when this all starts.
IGN: So how much of this is an Avengers story, as well as being a Black Panther story?
EN: I think the Avengers have to think of themselves as a collective unit, right? As a team, what does it mean for us to approach this country in this way? Part of that subtext is in there, but also, it’s an ongoing struggle between the Avengers and AIM to control these advanced artifacts and technologies that Monica Rappaccini wants to use in her quest to kind of stave off this nightmarish future that she’s glimpsed.
That’s one of the reasons she wants Vibranium, she wants Vibranium to use it and weaponize it against this coming threat that she’s aware of. I’m trying to not spoil anything for anyone who hasn’t played the Avengers campaign, but there’s a big looming threat that she’s organizing again. The Avengers part of it is, yeah, they want to fight that threat too, but not by stealing Wakanda Vibranium, you’re not going to let that happen.
IGN: Is there a specific comic book run that served as an inspiration? I know you’ve obviously written your own Black Panther run.
EN: Yeah, the folks at the narrative team at Crystal Dynamics have cited Rise of the Black Panther as an inspiration, which is really flattering, but this is really a first contact story, right? So it’s what happens when other people come to Wakanda. There’s been so many of those in the Black Panther’s publishing history, Fantastic Four number 52, where he lures Fantastic Four to Wakanda and he kind of whoops their asses almost entirely by himself.
There’s Reginald Hudlin’s, that first story arc is very much, oh, this country has all these capabilities we never reckoned with. How does the rest of the world reckon with that? There’s a lot of that in Christopher Priest’s run where we have these notions about this small African nation and really, they explode once you come face to face with the reality of what it is.
Crystal Dynamics have cited Rise of the Black Panther as an inspiration, which is really flattering.
All those storylines where people kind of come to Wakanda for the first time and get their minds blown were things that we talked about. But also, we also talked about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ run where the idea of Wakanda’s cultural history and national identity gets challenged when a real threat emerges, so that was part of the discussions we had with the narrative team.
IGN: Are you excited about the possibility of working on further Marvel’s Avengers projects? I know you helped with Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and I know Spider-Man is coming to Avengers. Is that something you’re interested in at all?
EN: Without spoiling anything that I may or may not be working on. It’s interesting, I’m kind of being approached a little bit as a superhero whisperer now, on some of the projects that I’m working on, which… I’ve written comics, I’ve written criticisms about comics, I’ve written in games and criticisms about games.
So, yeah, people I think are perceiving me as having certain skills and strengths that they want to add to their projects. It’s a great place to be as somebody who’s loved this stuff his entire life and thought about it critically and mechanically. It’s good to be on the other side of things and helping build the worlds that people get to play through.
IGN: Lastly, Chris, I just want to know how much you are looking forward to jumping back into the world of God of War?
CJ: What world?
IGN: The world of God of War.
CJ: Never heard of it (laughs).
IGN: That’s what I thought you might say. You can’t blame me for trying.
CJ: I can’t blame you (laughs more).
Simon Cardy can’t wait to level Black Panther all the way up to 150 and has all the polychoron in the world waiting. Find him over on Twitter at @CardySimon.