Six years without Chadwick Boseman: honoring a Hollywood icon
Six years later, Chadwick Boseman’s work — from Jackie Robinson and James Brown to T’Challa and Levee Green — still floors you.
In Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the first thing you notice about Chadwick Boseman as Levee Green is the voltage: the fast-talking swagger, the trumpet raised like a dare, the way he blows a hole in every room he enters. Directed by George C. Wolfe from August Wilson’s play, the film arrived after Boseman’s death, and that volatility now plays like a floodlight on everything he still had to give.
What audiences couldn’t see at the time: while he was electrifying blockbuster crowds in Avengers: Endgame and drilling into the haunted memories of war in Da 5 Bloods, he was also carrying a diagnosis he had chosen to keep to himself.
Boseman kept a Stage III colon cancer diagnosis private from 2016 until his death at 43 on August 28, 2020.
Even that viral red-carpet clip where he jokes “I’m dead” wasn’t a hint at his health — he was referring to T’Challa having been dusted in Avengers: Infinity War, long before the character returned in Endgame.
Before Wakanda
Long before the crown, Boseman was already shaping American icons with sharply different energies. In 42, he played Jackie Robinson with near-surgical restraint — a glance, a clenched jaw, a bat gripped just a shade too tight did the talking. You could feel the pressure without a speech.
Then he flipped the dial for Get On Up as James Brown, all funk and fire, a body turned into rhythm and defiance. Critics zeroed in on that transformation as the movie ’s engine. He kept shifting gears: the cool precision of Marshall, the command presence of 21 Bridges, and a near-mythic ripple through Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods as a fallen squad leader who still dominates the story from beyond the grave.
- 42 — Jackie Robinson, played with contained fury and grace
- Get On Up — James Brown, a kinetic, swaggering shape-shift
- Marshall — Thurgood Marshall before the Supreme Court years
- 21 Bridges — a driven NYPD detective anchoring a straight-ahead thriller
- Da 5 Bloods — Stormin’ Norman, a heroic ghost whose legend fuels the film
- Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom — Levee Green, a live wire and his final completed role
Across that run, he kept the diagnosis to himself and kept working — through surgeries and chemotherapy — until the films were finished.