David Jonsson is our new Black Panther, and has been for longer than you might think!
During Marvel Studios' San Diego Comic-Con Hall H panel on Saturday, director Ryan Coogler invited the Alien: Romulus and The Long Walk star onto the stage, officially welcoming the actor to the MCU as T'Challa II.
Jonsson will play the adult version of Toussaint, the child of Chadwick Boseman’s original T’Challa and Lupita Nyong’o’s Nakia, who we met at the end of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. He will debut as the character in Black Panther 3, which has set an official release date of December 15, 2028.
During a post-SDCC interview with Empire, Kevin Feige explained how Jonsson ended up landing the role.
“I’ll give you the real scoop,” said the Marvel Studios boss. “We hadn’t started a search yet. Ryan was working on Sinners, and when Ryan works on a project he’s all in. So the presumption very much was we would sit with him after Sinners came out, after the Academy campaign. We were waiting ’til after the Academy Awards to sit with Ryan and begin that process."
"A month and a half or so before that process, he called me and said, ‘I found him’. I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He goes, ‘I found him. He’s this guy, David Jonsson.’ He mentioned his movies. I had seen some of them. I watched more. He goes, ‘I’m going to meet him.’ He had a secret meeting with him under cloak of darkness in a hotel somewhere, and called me afterwards and said, ‘He’s the guy, he’s the guy, I felt it. I felt it in my soul. He’s a good man, and he is the next Black Panther.’ And I got chills, and I got a little welled-up and said, ‘Let’s do it’. So we’ve been sitting on this secret for a good five or six months.”
Black Panther 3 plot details are still under wraps, but either a significant time jump will be involved, or something will occur during the events of Doomsday or Secret Wars to explain how the young T'Challa was aged up to a man in his late 20s/early 30s.
We do know that Denzel Washington will also appear in the movie, but no details on his character have been disclosed.