Though we still haven't heard anything official, Marvel Studios is believed to be searching for an actor to play a new take on T'Challa in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Although the initial rumor suggested that Kevin Feige and co. were planning to introduce a variant of the same character the late Chadwick Boseman portrayed, it seems more likely that the studio is actually in the process of casting an actor for the role of the original T'Challa's son (Toussaint, aka Prince T'Challa), who we met at the end of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
We have heard that Marvel has already approached a couple of actors to play the character - including Snowfall breakout Damson Idris - but may have been having some trouble filling the role (it's no small thing to follow in Boseman's footsteps, after all). Has the studio finally found their man?
On this week's episode of The Hot Mic, Jeff Sneider says he's heard that Marvel "knows who they want" to play the new Black Panther. Though he stresses that he doesn't have any inside info, he believes it might be Alien: Romulus star David Jonsson.
This isn't the first time we've heard Jonsson's name mentioned in connection with a potential Marvel role, and Marvel is not the only studio that's said to be keen to work with him following his standout performance in Romulus.
Whoever ends up accepting the role, the new T'Challa is expected to debut in one of the upcoming Avengers movies before going on to play a bigger part in Black Panther 3.
Here's what director Ryan Coogler had to say about the prospect of recasting T'Challa in a 2022 interview.
“For me to say we considered recasting as an option, that’s a complicated thing even to say/ Because, like, with these movies, just like my job as a director, I don’t think people fully appreciate a job that is not their own. But the true day-to-day of my job is several hundred days of long days of getting other professionals to believe in ideas I find truthful. That’s what my job is. I have to believe in something enough to go convince other professionals to believe in it as well for an extended period of time. And the moment I stop believing what I’m doing, whatever end product that I am putting out is cooked. It’s done. It has to be truthful for me. And if there’s any element of ‘nope,’ for me, in the process, it’s my job to weed that out."
“My truth is Chadwick is gone from the physical sense; he wasn’t walking through that door. And the world that we created over the years, he was the guy. So for someone else to be him—for us in the world that we created—we wouldn’t have believed it. No matter how good the actor was, no matter, it would have been lacking the necessary truth for us to do a good job. And truth is the well we pull from as artists. Our truth was lost, which is a fact of life; it’s the gift and curse of life. Heroes and great men die."