Before the late, great Chadwick Boseman became Black Panther’s King T’Challa, cementing his position amongst the Hollywood A list and his place in the history books as Marvel’s first black superhero, he was a writer. Having penned his first theatre script in high school, Boseman spent a formative summer at Oxford University studying Shakespeare as part of the British American Drama Academy programme and, later, wrote two further plays: Hieroglyphic Graffiti and 2005’s Deep Azure.
The latter was a piece of lively and hyper-articulate hip-hop theatre inspired by the shooting of Prince Jones - a friend and fellow student at Washington DC’s Howard University, who died after being shot 16 times by a police officer in a case of mistaken identity that was never brought to justice. In an unexpected curveball, the play would go on to change Boseman’s own life when, during initial casting for a screen adaptation, prominent acting agent Michael Greene decided to look up the man who wrote this most lyrical and curious of scripts. He signed Boseman and the rest is history.
