Ryan Coogler Details Final Conversation With Chadwick Boseman

• Ryan Coogler recalls Chadwick Boseman’s last conversation with him.
• He was “too tired” to read the sequel’s script at the time.
• Black Panther: Wakanda Forever opens nationwide on Nov. 11.

The legacy of The Black Panther endures.

Ryan Coogler, the director of Black Panther, is reflecting on their final conversation two years after Chadwick Boseman passed away at age 43 from colon cancer.

“My last conversation with him was calling to ask if he wanted to read [the script] before I got notes from the studio,” he said Nov. 3 episode of the Wakanda Forever: The Official Black Panther Podcast. “That was the last time we spoke. He passed maybe a couple weeks after I finished.”

Through the phone, Coogler noticed just how tired Boseman—who played the titular Marvel superhero—really was.

“I could tell he was laying down when we were talking,” he added, noting Boseman’s wife Simone Ledward Boseman was also there. “He kicked Simone out because he told her he didn’t want her to hear nothing that could get him in trouble with his NDA.”

And though Boseman refused to read the sequel’s script—telling the director he didn’t want to get in the way of the studio’s notes—Coogler shared, “I found out later that he was too tired to read anything.”

But it wasn’t all business in that call.

As Boseman was planning his wedding at the time, “he was talking about how many people were coming,” Coogler, wed to Zinzi Evans, added, “and he asked about my kid because he’d missed the baby shower.”

Weeks later, the actor’s shocking death rocked him.

“I was at my house,” he said. “I got a call from my manager Charles King. He called and told me, and I didn’t want to believe it, so I called Denzel [Washington], and I spoke to him and we thought it might be a rumor, so I texted Chad, I was in denial.”

“Everything about Chad was unique,” Coogler said. “How he lived and how he died was unique.”

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever opens nationwide on Nov. 11.

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