Black Panther Casino Scene Cast
Posted on Wednesday, January 24th, 2018 by Angie Han
Black Panther is the 2018 superhero Marvel Comics character movie produced by Walt Disney Studio. It is the 18th film from the Marvel Cinematic Universe featuring the following star cast: Chadwick Boseman as T’Challa / Black Panther, Michael B. Jordan as Erik Killmonger; Lupita Nyong’o as Nakia; Danai Gurira as Okoye; Daniel Kaluuya as W’Kabi. Black Panther director and co-writer Ryan Coogler lends his filmmaking know-how in a new video breakdown of the film's South Korean casino fight sequence. With its opening weekend in the rearview, it's clear that Marvel's first film of 2018 has become a runaway success. Black Panther is a movie that proved that stories featuring minorities can reap huge returns and that having strong female warriors does not take away from the merit of the central character. In fact, the characters around T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman) — namely Shuri (Letitia Wright), Nakia (Lupita Nyong'o), M'Baku (Winston Duke) and Okoye.
Wakanda doesn’t actually exist, and if it did, it’d be located somewhere in Africa. But for a several weeks last winter, it actually set up shop right in Atlanta.
More specifically, it was situated in Pinewood Studios, which is where I and several other journalists found ourselves in February 2017. We’d come to visit the set of Black Panther, which even then felt like one of the most hotly anticipated movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s decade-long history.
We were rewarded with a wealth of information about the film – everything from the inspirations behind the look of Wakanda’s Golden City to some juicy details about the central themes that drive the movie.
Black Panther Borrows From the Comics
Although Black Panther is relatively new to the MCU (he made his first onscreen appearance in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War) the character has been around in the comics since the 1960s. Like all long-lived superheroes, he’s changed time and time again – to reflect whoever was writing or drawing him at any given time, to react to an evolving culture.
Now he’s refashioned himself onscreen as the MCU’s first leading black superhero. But to take that leap to the screen, the team behind Black Panther had to look to the comic pages.
“I would say the two runs that were most inspirational were the [Christopher] Priest and Ta-Nehisi [Coates] run,” producer Nate Moore told us. The visuals were also drawn from the books. “Brian Stelfreeze is an amazing artist and some of his version of Wakanda, and even Wakanda technology, was stuff that we borrowed pretty liberally from.”
Wakanda Is Fantastical – But Not By That Much
Wakanda being what it is – which is to say, totally fictional – it could’ve wound up being just about anything the Black Panther team imagined. The approach they went with was to make the country feel “amazing” yet “grounded.”
“What we were very afraid of was making Wakanda almost too Kirby-esque, and by that I mean making it feel almost like they’re alien and not human,” said Moore. “The truth is they’re human. They’re just 20 or 25 years ahead of us.”
Wakanda got there through a combination of natural resources (it sits atop a rich store of vibranium), technological ingenuity, and deliberate secrecy. It’s a country that’s never been conquered, largely because it’s been careful to present itself to the rest of the world as a place that’s not worth conquering.
That’s freed up Wakanda to pour their energy into technological advancement – which, in turn, has resulted in a unique culture that combines ancient tradition with cutting-edge modernity.
T’Challa Struggles to Be Leader and a Superhero
That’s the context in which T’Challa was raised, and that’s the context in which he must now rule. Black Panther picks up not long after Civil War left off, which means T’Challa’s still mourning the death of his father and settling into his new position as king. To top it all off, his actions as the Black Panther have exposed Wakanda to the rest of the world.
It’s a lot for any one person to handle – even one as powerful, as intelligent, and as capable as T’Challa – and the film finds him pulled in a few different directions. “I think that’s the big question,” said producer Nate Moore. “Can you be a leader for a country and still be a hero? And still look out for the interests of the world when you have a constituency that has a very specific agenda?”
Needless to say, not everyone in Wakanda is pleased with the way that T’Challa is going about resolving that tension. “All of Wakanda is not monolithic,” said Moore. “I don’t think everybody in Wakanda was super happy that he was out there [in Civil War]. For a country that values its secrecy so much, it was a big deal.”
Black Panther Is Part Godfather, Part Bond
That political unrest sends our heroes on an adventure that sounds less like your typical superhero wish-fulfillment fantasy, and more like a mix of power-play drama and jet-setting spy action.
Moore told us that director Ryan Coogler saw Black Panther as an almost Godfather-ish saga, in that it deals with a family organization (in Black Panther’s case, the royal court) dealing with a change in leadership. Various factions are vying for power within the country.
Wakanda’s internal conflict turns out to have consequences outside the country’s borders as well. That’s where the Bond influences come in. Moore described Black Panther as a “big globe-trotting epic” – which probably doesn’t sound all that crazy, if you’ve already seen bits of that South Korean casino scene.
The Villains’ Grudges Get Very Personal
Into this world come two villains with two very different, very personal agendas…even if all the cast members are kind of reluctant to say exactly what those agendas are.
Black Panther Casino Scene Cast Of Characters
The one we’ve met before is Ulysses Klaue. Since Avengers: Age of Ultron, Andy Serkis explained, has been running around “causing mayhem in the world, on minor and major levels.” But he’s got a very specific love-hate relationship with Wakanda. “He certainly has discovered things about it than nobody else has,” he said. “He’s one of the few people who’s been into Wakanda, and he reveals quite a lot about it.”
Black Panther Casino Scene Cast Members
Michael B. Jordan plays the film’s other villain, Erik Killmonger – though Killmonger himself would never refer to himself as such. Instead, Jordan said, Killmonger would say he’s a revolutionary. “I feel like Killmonger is very selfless. I feel like he’s looking at the bigger picture.”
Whatever that “bigger picture” is (and Jordan wasn’t allowed to get much more specific), it’s not the same one T’Challa has in mind. “Killmonger sees Wakanda as something that could be used differently than it currently is, and that puts him directly at odds with T’Challa,” teased Moore.