Chadwick Boseman Was the Definition of a Hero

This versatility and talent made an entire industry take notice. When Boseman was promoting Get On Up, he got a call from Marvel Studios—they were preparing to introduce the character of Black Panther into their byzantine cinematic universe, and there was only one person they wanted. “You hear people say this all the time … but he was the only choice,” Marvel producer Kevin Feige later said in an interview. Black Panther, the king of the fictional African nation of Wakanda, was the first African superhero in American comics, a milestone figure created in the 1960s. But Boseman’s performance in four Marvel movies vaulted the character to total global celebrity.

Read: What Chadwick Boseman and Lupita Nyong’o learned about Wakanda

Black Panther was a staggering cultural phenomenon when it arrived in 2018, the fourth-highest grossing movie in domestic box-office history. And though Ryan Coogler’s film is filled with visual invention, dense world-building, and memorable supporting turns, it’s rooted in Boseman’s gravitas, in his ability to project authority and power. T’Challa is a purposefully idealized figure, a sensitive and just warrior who struggles courageously with the burden of leading an entire nation. The movie wouldn’t work without the innate humanity he gives T’Challa, even as he bounds into battle in a high-tech battle suit.

Boseman’s history of playing beloved, revolutionary figures shaped the way audiences and other directors saw him. When Spike Lee was making his latest film, Da 5 Bloods, he centered the plot on a Black soldier who had died in the Vietnam War—Stormin’ Norman, a wise squad leader whose compatriots try to recover his body many years later. Lee was adapting an original script that depicted Norman as still being alive, carrying out raids deep in the jungles, but he decided the character made more sense as a deceased, romanticized figure—a tragic loss from a bleak era in American history. “Here’s the thing for me. This character is heroic; he’s a superhero. Who do we cast? We cast Jackie Robinson, James Brown, Thurgood Marshall, and we cast T’Challa!” Lee told me in an interview earlier this year. “Chad is a superhero! That character is Christlike … there’s light from heaven coming down from above on him.”

Read: The long, strange journey of ‘Da 5 Bloods’

Da 5 Bloods is just one of the many movies Boseman filmed while suffering from colon cancer, and it must have been an unimaginable effort for him like the rest. The actor’s screen presence is as transfixing as Lee intended, and it’s helped by the fact that in flashbacks, Boseman’s character is the only one depicted as a young man, while his squad members are played by older actors who recall him as he once was. It’s crushing to consider, but Boseman’s legacy will be the incredible body of work he created in just seven years: a catalog of heroic figures similarly frozen in time, to be remembered forever.

David Sims is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers culture.