Real-life badass Danai Gurira hired an Olympic swimming coach to train for her role as fictional badass Okoye in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
"It wasn’t really necessary to go in like that, but I went all in," Gurira said of her process
There’s a slight (read: way, way too high) chance you’ve seen the words “method acting” floating around the internet somewhere over the course of the past few months. Not only is that conversation tiresome and frequently very icky, but it has also overshadowed stories of actors going to extraordinary lengths to make their characters come to life but, you know, in a healthy, non-exploitative way.
One of those actors that actually deserves to be celebrated for their job prep is Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’s Danai Gurira, who recently told The Cut that she hired an Olympic swimming coach to help her embody her role as Okoye in the new film, even though she used to swim competitively as a child.
“As I’m sure you’ve seen in the previews, there’s a little bit of water in this movie,” she said. (The plot involves a conflict between Wakanda and the underwater kingdom of Talokan.) “So when I heard that, I hadn’t read the script, but I went and found this Olympic-trainer swimming coach. I was like, ‘Teach me everything.’”
“It wasn’t really necessary to go in like that, but I went all in,” she continued. “It was really fun to really work at improving my stroke and to see improvement and transformation in my technique and in my speed. I sent a little video to Ryan [Coogler, the director], and he was in shock. He was like, ‘What the hell?’”
Gurira also addressed a potential larger cultural impact of her performance in the interview:
I’m getting into this aspect of the fact that there’s an issue with Black kids and swimming. I saw the stat that a Black child is five times more likely to drown than a white child, and that got me. I just got more interested in trying to bring awareness to it, and I’ll be looking into that more. There’s a lot that goes into the fact that we as Black folks don’t often get that skill, but it is a very important skill and people lose their lives around it when they don’t have to. I tried to help a couple of my friends learn to swim — grown-ass women like me. It’s interesting. There’s sometimes a panic around water. It takes effort. For a lot of people, if their family doesn’t do it, they end up not doing it. It’s a whole thing. That stat really hit me hard.
This is something Coogler has also spoken to. “A lot of us were raised to have fear of water,” the director recently told Variety. “If the camera’s in the water, actors are in the water, I’ve got to be in there too. I had to figure out how to swim, so I could direct this movie.”
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is now playing exclusively in theaters.