RIP Chadwick Boseman

What we know is Chadwick Boseman was a brilliant man, a tremendous actor, and a genuine human being. He played iconic figures of American history, and he created iconic figures that have defined world culture. He quietly battled cancer for four years while working harder than most of us will work in 40. He spent his nearly 43 years on earth not only playing heroes but embodying them. He is dead way too soon.

The news does not hit you right away because it does not make sense. We just saw him this year in Spike Lee’s Vietnam opus, Da 5 Bloods. We will see him again this year when the August Wilson adaptation Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom comes out. He will undoubtedly be wonderful in the film, and it will serve as his final big-screen gift to us. The gift all along, of course, was having him in our lives.

He rose to prominence as Jackie Robinson in 42. Much will be made of his death coming on the day Major League Baseball was celebrating Jackie Robinson Day, one of those cosmic coincidences that feels somehow scripted. It is not and feels to me more sad than poetic. He also took on Thurgood Marshall and James Brown. He brought grace, power, and sensitivity to all of these roles. 

And, there was Black Panther. It is on as I type this. It remains the defining masterpiece of the Marvel era. The cultural capital of the Marvel Cinematic Universe often feels purchased and purchasable. Black Panther feels earned, necessary. The world needed a movie like Black Panther, and it needed a hero like King T’Challa. For it all to work, though, the enterprise needed an actor who could engage, empower, and inspire. That actor was Chadwick Boseman, could only have been Chadwick Boseman.

There have been three or four good Superman performers. As many or more solid Batman actors. Three Spider-men just this century. Often, superheroes feel interchangeable -- that is the purchased cultural capital we were talking about -- but Black Panther is not interchangeable. Chadwick Boseman is not replaceable. Oh, he will be replaced because the gods of profit demand a Black Panther 2, and the millions across the globe who find hope and inspiration in the character to see the story continued.

But Black Panther without Chadwick Boseman will be inherently lesser. Hollywood without Chadwick Boseman is inherently lesser. The world is inherently lesser. Rest in power.