Chadwick Boseman is an American actor. He is best known for his portrayal of T’Challa / Black Panther in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (since 2016), 42 (2013), Get on Up (2014) and Marshall (2017).
He also starred in The Express (2008), Draft Day (2014), and Message from the King (2016).
Boseman’s first starring role was in 42, in which he played Jackie Robinson.
Boseman was born and raised in Anderson, South Carolina,in “The Upstate” area, son of Carolyn and Leroy Boseman.His mother was a nurse and his father worked at a textile factory, keeping an upholstery business as well. Boseman graduated from T. L. Hanna High School in 1995.[9] In his junior year, he wrote his first play, Crossroads, and staged it at the school after a classmate was shot and killed.He studied at Howard University in Washington, DC, graduating in 2000 with a bachelor of fine arts in directing.One of his teachers was Phylicia Rashad, who became a mentor to him. She helped raise funds so that Boseman and some classmates could attend the Oxford Mid-Summer Program of the British American Drama Academy in London, to which they’d been accepted.
Boseman wanted to write and direct, and initially began studying acting to learn how to relate to actors.After he returned to the US, he graduated from New York City’s Digital Film Academy.He lived in Brooklyn at the start of his career.Boseman worked as the drama instructor in the Schomburg Junior Scholars Program, housed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York.In 2008 he moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career.
A graduate of Howard University and the British American Drama Academy, Chadwick Boseman intended to write and direct. But his career took him on a different path. He first taught drama in Harlem for five years before making the move to Los Angeles to pursue acting. After a string of bit parts on “All My Children,” “Law & Order,” “ER,” and “Lie to Me,” Boseman got his first series regular role on the short-lived crime drama “Lincoln Heights.”
Boseman’s breakout role came in 2013 when he was cast as baseball great Jackie Robinson in the biopic 42. In 2014 he took on the role of another legend, James Brown, in the critically acclaimed biopic Get on Up. You can also catch Boseman as the first African-American Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall, in the 2017 biopic Marshall.
Boseman was raised as a Christian. He was baptized, and was part of a church choir and youth group. His former pastor said that he still keeps his faith.Boseman has stated that he prayed to be the Black Panther before he was cast as the character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Based on his father’s taking a DNA ancestry test, Boseman has learned that they are descended from West African peoples: the Limba and Mende people of Sierra Leone, Yoruba of Nigeria, and Jola people of Guinea-Bissau.
