In his three-year professional acting career, actor Winston Duke has yet to appear on the silver screen in a major production.Come February, that’s all going to change when the Tobagonian native appears in Marvel Studios’ Black Panther.And no way you look at it, Duke is still as humble as can be while talking about his big break.
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Originally thinking he was passed over for the part he auditioned for — the Wakandan villain M’Baku — Duke told People Magazine it was quite the emotional experience finding out he got the role.
“My agents love pranking me,” Duke recalled. “So they called and were like, ‘You really need to sit down for this. We’ve got some bad news.’”
No bad news was to be had, however.Duke was told he got the part and he’d be a member of one of the most impressive casts Marvel Studios has ever put together.
“I went quiet, just dead quiet on the phone,” he said. “And I started sobbing because it meant so much.”
Once he found out, it was off to the races as the Yale graduate tried learning as much about his character as possible.
“I was a big comic, cartoon, animation nerd,” Duke recalled of his youth.”So I was really familiar with it, but not as much with Black Panther. The neighborhood comic guy where I live in Los Angeles, he pulled every single issue of comic that my character ever appeared in. He found me the first appearance of my character and recommended different iterations of the comic that I look into. So the entire culture of this comic book world has been super supportive since day one.”
And believe it or not — Duke isn’t the only Yale grad on the cast.He’s joined by the Oscar-winning Lupita Nyong’o.Coincidentally enough, Nyong’o — who plays Nakia, a member of T’Challa’s all-female security force called the Dora Milaje — and Duke saw The Avengers together when it was first released.
“We saw the first Avengers movie together and had wondered if we’d ever get to a be in a movie like that — such a big budget, crazy vehicle with special effects and tons of funny, cool people that you admire,” Duke recalls. “And we were just like ‘Yeah, I don’t know if that’s ever going to happen.’ And then for this to be my first movie, her first Marvel film, we were like ‘Can you believe that happened? Do you remember Avengers in New Haven, Connecticut?’”
Black Panther currently has a 4.10 out of 5 ComicBook.com User Anticipation Rating, making it the fifth most anticipated upcoming comic book movie among ComicBook.com User. Let us know how excited you are for Black Panther by giving the film your own personal ComicBook.com User Anticipation Rating below.
Black Panther opens in theaters on February 16, 2018.
Other upcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe movies include Thor: Ragnarok on November 2, 2017, Avengers: Infinity War on May 4, 2018, Ant-Man and the Wasp on July 6, 2018, Captain Marvel on March 8, 2019, the fourth Avengers movie on May 3, 2019, the sequel to Spider-Man: Homecoming on July 5, 2019, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 in 2020.
