Mabel Cadena has said Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, a 2022 American superhero film based on the Marvel Comics character Black Panther, was not an easy task.
After being asked what surprised her about the process of making the movie alongside her co-stars, Letitia Wright, Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke and Angela Bassett, the 32-year-old actress told Collider:
Everything. Everything. It’s a surprise because, well, the training, it’s huge. It’s not easy.
No, it’s like a master class for me because you need focus on every part of your character. It’s like, we need training for swimming underwater, for acting underwater, for holding breath.
You need to learn Mayan, you need to learn English, you need to learn a lot of things because we have a lot of diversity in the movie.
So it’s huge work in a movie like this. It’s like, “Oh my God,” I need more hours in my day.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever also features Danai Gurira, a Hollywood-based Zimbabwean actress who stars as Okoye in the film.
Danai said it was emotional following the death of Chadwick Boseman and explained how the cast expressed their “grief and loss” through their characters. The 44-year-old reflected during an appearance on The Jonathan Ross Show:
It was a very tough shoot in a lot of ways, a lot of challenges were hitting us, but it was just the determination we had really to honour him and to keep his legacy going.
Actor Martin Freeman, who plays Everett K. Ross in the film, reflected on filming Boseman’s character’s funeral and the reality of not having the star with them anymore on-screen.
Freeman it was a very strange thing not seeing him “on the call sheet and you don’t see him around and you know he’s not in the next trailer down.”