Last year, on August 28, 2020, the world learned about the tragic passing of Chadwick Boseman. In the time since his unexpected death, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom has been the only project in which he has appeared posthumously, and now, as we approach the one-year anniversary of the beloved actor’s death, fans are finally able to witness Boseman’s final performance as T’Challa.
Marvel’s new animated series What If…? has arrived on Disney Plus, and in its second episode, Boseman makes a posthumous appearance as the voice actor behind Star-Lord T’Challa. According to Complex, Chadwick Boseman recorded all of his dialogue for the series before his death at age 43, making it his last performance as T’Challa and his final role overall.
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Kevin Feige has spoken on Boseman’s performance in the episode, which explores the idea of T’Challa taking on the title Star-Lord after he was abducted from Wakanda at an early age. According to Complex, the Oscar nominee adopts an attitude different from the one T’Challa had in Black Panther and other MCU projects, and that was reportedly influencing Black Panther: Wakanda Forever prior to Boseman’s death.
“We didn’t know it would be his final performance,” Feige told Variety. “He came in, numerous times, and was so gung-ho about it, was so excited about it. Somebody [has] probably spoken about this already, but he came in, he read the episode that airs 24 hours from now and then came back and said, ‘I really love this version of T’Challa.’ We had a conversation with Ryan [Coogler] about how do we get some of this voice, not the storyline, into Black Panther 2.”
It turns out that Kevin Feige isn’t the only person feeling emotional about Chadwick Boseman’s final performance as T’Challa. On Twitter, fans have been reacting to the quirky MCU side project, with many fans saying that Boseman’s work is great, yet bittersweet. See what fans had to say about the new What If…? episode starring Chadwick Boseman below.
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