In Black Panther she was the comic relief, the teenage princess who built her brother’s suit and teased him about his sandals. Four years later she was the Black Panther. Letitia Wright’s rise from Shuri to the title role is one of the strangest and saddest stories in modern Hollywood, because it happened after the death of Chadwick Boseman.
Born in Guyana
Wright was born on 31 October 1993 in Georgetown, Guyana. She moved to London with her family when she was a child and grew up in Tottenham, north London. She decided to act after watching Akeelah and the Bee, and studied at the Identity School of Acting in London, a school with a strong record of training Black British actors.
Early work
Her early career was in British television and film: Top Boy, Chasing Shadows, Humans and Urban Hymn. In 2017 she appeared in “Black Museum”, an episode of Black Mirror, which earned her an Emmy nomination. She also had a role in Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, released in 2018.
Shuri
Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, released in February 2018, was a global event. Wright played Shuri, the younger sister of T’Challa and the technological genius of Wakanda. She stole scene after scene, and audiences loved her. In 2019 she won the BAFTA Rising Star Award.
Shuri returned in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, and Wright became one of the faces of Marvel’s next generation.
Losing Chadwick Boseman
Chadwick Boseman died of colon cancer in August 2020. He had kept his illness private. His death left Marvel without its Black Panther and his co-stars without a friend. Coogler rewrote the sequel around grief.
Wakanda Forever
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was released in November 2022. In it, Shuri mourns her brother and eventually takes up the mantle of the Black Panther. The production was hard. Wright suffered a shoulder injury during filming in 2021, which delayed the shoot. The film was a large commercial success.
Controversy
Wright has faced criticism at times, notably in 2020 when she shared a video on social media that questioned Covid-19 vaccines. She later said she had not meant to hurt anyone and stepped away from Twitter for a time.
Beyond Marvel
Wright has taken serious dramatic work outside the franchise, including Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology in 2020, where she played the activist Altheia Jones-LeCointe in “Mangrove”, and The Silent Twins in 2022.
She began as the clever little sister in a story about a king. Through circumstances nobody wanted, she ended up carrying the story herself.
