It’s a testament to Marvel Studios’ recent output that the Disney subsidiary doesn’t seem to have any issue luring top-tier acting talent to jump around like kids playing dress-up, and Lupita Nyong’o may be the latest celebrated thespian to join its cinematic universe. The 33-year-old Oscar-winning actress is currently in talks to take on the role of romantic lead in Ryan Coogler’s upcoming Black Panther, Variety reports.
While it’s reported that Nyong’o would play the love interest of T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman)—king of the fictional nation Wakanda and true identity of the film’s titular superhero—the details of her character are still unknown. In the comics, the African leader is married to Kenyan-American superhero Ororo Munroe, more commonly known as Storm. However, that character is a member of the X-Men, which is controlled by 20th Century Fox, so, that’s probably not who Nyong’o will be playing. (The weather-manipulating mutant was portrayed by Halle Berry in five previous X-Men films, and by by Alexandra Shipp in X-Men: Apocalypse.)
This is not the first Disney tentpole film that Nyong’o has signed onto, though it might be the first one in which we’ll actually see her face. She performed the motion-capture alien Maz Kanata in last year’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and provided her voice to the wolf Raksha in this spring’s The Jungle Book. This fall, she’ll be seen as the mother of a young chess prodigy in Disney’s quieter and less-blockbustery The Queen Of Katwe.