Ten years ago, Danai Gurira was sprinting on the treadmill at her gym when, in a haze of sweat and adrenaline, a thought crossed her mind: “I want to do action. I want to be an action dude. I want to do action things.”
At that point, Gurira was not exactly your stereotypical action hero. She had a Master of Fine Arts from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (in fact, she was still using their gym) and a few indie films under her belt. She was also an accomplished theatre actor and playwright, having premiered her first off-Broadway play, In the Continuum, in 2005. Career-wise, the overall vibe was decidedly more Sam Shepard than Sly Stallone. But for whatever reason, Gurira felt a pull towards ass-kicking. A few weeks later, she got her wish: a role in The Walking Dead as Michonne, a fierce survivor swinging her katana through the zombie apocalypse. “It’s a bizarre juxtaposition, being a playwright,” Gurira says. But she couldn’t deny that the high-octane stuff came naturally. “The idea that a woman is not supposed to express ferocity is something that I’ve always rejected.”
Gurira spent eight years as Michonne, as a fan favorite on one of the most popular television shows of all time. In 2018 she traded in her sword for a spear to play Okoye, the hyper-capable leader of the Dora Milaje, Wakanda’s elite all-female special forces unit, in Black Panther. When the film premiered in 2018, it was the biggest Marvel solo superhero release to date, raking in $1.3 billion globally. Moreover, Black Panther transcended blockbuster status, leaving fingerprints all over the culture. You would see the Wakandan arms-crossed salute on basketball and tennis courts, football and cricket pitches, as Black athletes celebrated victories with the gesture. Gurira recalls promoting the movie throughout Africa. “I was called ‘General’ by a guy in Nigeria, who was definitely near 70. He was like – she mimes pointing and shouting – “‘General!’ You’re like, ‘Wow, that’s cool.’ I don’t know if he’s ever called a woman ‘general’ in his life.”
We’re at a French restaurant in downtown Manhattan on a late summer afternoon, not too far from where her treadmill epiphany occurred. When Gurira isn’t filming in Atlanta, she splits her time between New York and Los Angeles. (Her dog, Papi, a “little macho guy,” is back in LA.) Today, she is wearing a forest-green jumpsuit, snakeskin heels, gold sunglasses that look like they’re from the year 2322, and the reed-straight posture of someone who is the alpha of every room she enters. “I have a trainer who’s insanely intense,” she says. “I mean, you point at a muscle, I can name it.”
Off-screen, Gurira isn’t nearly as intimidating. “I think people see Danai as elegant, and she’s unbelievably intelligent and strong,” former Walking Dead showrunner and Gurira’s frequent collaborator Scott Gimple told me. “I don’t think people understand just how funny she is, how nerdy she can be, how Larry David she can be.”
Gurira, 44, has just returned from a solo holiday to Jamaica, where she spent two and a half weeks swimming and journalling and re-centering herself. (And also where, as she casually mentions, she happened to meet Grace Jones.) “It was a lot more fun than I’ve had in… I don’t know how many years,” she says. The trip was a welcome break after a frenetic period of her life. She had devoted the winter to filming the highly anticipated Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, out in November. She also spent the summer playing Richard III on stage, in the summer season of Shakespeare in the Park. Even when she was off roundhouse kicking, Gurira has always stayed busy with the theatre, writing and performing.
Her audiences don’t always intersect. Someone who’s wild about her Marvel work might not know that in 2016, she became the first African woman playwright to debut on Broadway with Eclipsed, a story revolving around four women during the Second Liberian Civil War. (The play further made history with six Tony nominations.) She recently heard about a professor who teaches her plays and had no idea that Gurira starred in record-smashing franchises.
“There aren’t a lot of actors who can pull off that combination of an inner depth with a really remarkable physical presence and capacity,” Anthony Russo, who directed her in Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, told me.
Sometimes Gurira’s fandoms overlap in unexpected places. The head of New York’s Public Theater, who has produced some of Gurira’s stage work, is a die-hard Walking Dead fan. When she played Richard III this summer, people showed up with Avengers posters for her to sign. Though her twin careers may seem like disparate pursuits, Gurira is always pushing forward with the same goal in mind.
“My whole thing is, ‘Tell African stories, tell African stories.’”
Long before Gurira became the living playwright most likely to win in hand-to-hand combat, she was a self-described theatre geek growing up in Harare, Zimbabwe. She was born in small-town Iowa to a chemistry professor father and college librarian mother, but her family moved back to their home country when she was five.
Zimbabwe had only recently gained independence. Neighboring South Africa was still under apartheid rule. She would see her white classmates hop across the border for shopping trips while she and her Black peers were unable to do the same. “You didn’t have the cool, fun, fancy stuff South Africa had in Zimbabwe,” she says. “So my white classmates would go and come back. We couldn’t go.”
Gurira’s first pull towards acting came when she was parked in front of the TV, absorbing Dynasty and Dallas. “Those sorts of women, Joan Collins types, in all their power and their glamour – it was an interesting thing for a little Black girl to watch. I would imitate her.” Gurira does her best imitation of a child imitating Joan Collins in Dynasty, dramatically brushing away an imaginary bouffant. “My siblings were like, ‘She’s crazy.’”
When she was 18, Gurira returned to the US to attend college in Minnesota. Before school started, she got a summer job working at the discount shoe chain Payless. The culture shock hit quickly. “I got an interesting crash course on how to interact and connect,” she says. “There was a different energy to people. There was a different way that people did everything, a different way they dressed. Obviously, they spoke in a different way.”
And then there was the food. “Food just tasted very different. Southern Africa is known for fantastic beef and that tasted different. I’ll stop there,” she says, politely abstaining from sharing any further thoughts on the cuisine of Minnesota, the birthplace of the dessert salad.
If anything, the disorientation helped to ground and focus her further. “It was just a realization of how this is such a land of plenty, but a land of plenty comes with distraction,” she says. “Because it can sweep you away – or you can steady your course. That became very clear to me at 19. It was a question of, what are you going to do with all of this?”
She found her answer while studying abroad in South Africa. At the time, she was getting her undergraduate degree in social psychology, planning on pursuing a life in the academy. She was attracted to the subject because of injustices she witnessed when she was younger. “Injustices drove me crazy, growing up as a kid in Zimbabwe,” she says. “When I would see injustices towards women, I was outraged. From a very young age, nine, I was getting into big arguments, fighting about things like that, with whomever I could.”
During her time abroad, Gurira was struck by the potential to merge her creative work with her ideals. “The artist in me was just starting to scream,” she says. “I think South Africa had something to do with it. It was still a very young nation, and we met a lot of folks who had used their art to impact apartheid.”
Armed with that revelation, she moved from Minnesota to New York for grad school to study acting at NYU. Ever since her return to America, Gurira found herself constantly bumping against misconceptions and generalizations about her other home continent. “People sometimes don’t want to hear the modern African experience. That doesn’t fit in with the narrative that’s in their head, the tape that plays in their head of what Africa’s supposed to be and what Africans are supposed to be,” she says.
She recalls an experience filming a documentary. “We were in very modern settings. But then when they showed me the footage of what they wanted me to sign off on, suddenly I was seeing a whole bunch of huts. And I’m like, ‘Where did this even come from?’ I didn’t see one hut the whole time we were doing this thing.”
And so Gurira committed herself to writing about the experiences of African women, when it seemed as if nobody else was succeeding. Her first off-Broadway play, In the Continuum, about two HIV-positive women, premiered in 2005. “I was very alone, very alone,” she says. “I was creating from a place of outrage. It was part of what propelled me.”
In her playwriting, Gurira will spelunk into history and return with something new and unseen. Gurira brings up her 2012 play The Convert, set in 1896 in what was then Rhodesia, about a girl who converts to Christianity to escape an arranged marriage. “I realized later in my writing process, oh, that’s my protagonist. She’s that chick from history, which just gets that one line.” But more than anything, she feels an impulse to avoid what she calls didactic “take your medicine” narratives. Yes, she’ll teach you something, but she’ll also be funny and unexpected, smashing clichés on the way.
The actor Sterling K. Brown, whom Gurira refers to as a “big brother,” has known her since those early days, when she was still getting a foothold. “Danai has always been an incredibly self-assured, highly motivated individual! She’s just become more of who she is! New challenges don’t faze her. They just provide her with another obstacle to overcome!” Brown wrote to me, in an email that contained no fewer than eight exclamation marks. (“If Danai ever thinks that someone has treated her friend in a way they shouldn’t be treated, she will come for you! And that’s all I can say about that,” he added.)
“My job is to lure your entire humanity into the story and then hit you with it,” Gurira says. “But not before you’ve laughed and cried and had a great time.”
Gurira recalls watching Black Panther for the first time at the South African premiere. “I remember Michael B [Jordan] was sitting behind me,” she says. “We were just squeezing each other’s hands like, ‘Oh my God. Oh my God.’”
It is difficult to overstate Black Panther’s cultural impact. It imagined a fictional African nation that, by not being subject to colonialism, managed to become the wealthiest and most technologically advanced country on Earth. The result was a celebratory, wholly original vision of Afrofuturism unlike anything ever seen at that scale. Chadwick Boseman, playing the titular superhero, T’Challa, became a worldwide icon. (“There was a profound love for Chadwick,” she says. “A deep love for him.”) It was the rare comic book movie that won Oscars. And the box office response? All the billions of dollars of proof you could want that there was real hunger to see Black stories being told. It changed perceptions for countless others. “One little white boy in England wouldn’t let go of my hand,” Gurira remembers. “His dad’s like, ‘I’m sorry. You’re his favorite and he just loves your character.’”
As the African leg of the press tour continued, Gurira witnessed the film’s impact firsthand. “It was beautiful, because there was such pride. Those countries grew up watching American movies, but they never reflected us, even for a millisecond. So the idea of seeing something like that and seeing this affirmation of, even though it’s Marvel, they were using real authentic representation in terms of language, music, costuming, and design. There was so much in it that was specific that made Africans feel seen.”
The sequel, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, was confirmed in 2019. Then, in late August 2020, the world learned that Boseman had died from colon cancer at the age of 43. He had been diagnosed in 2016, but kept his illness private, working through several feature films while secretly battling the disease. Though Gurira had a vague idea that something was wrong, she didn’t know the specifics.
When Gurira thinks about Boseman now, she thinks about how funny he was. “Very unexpectedly funny – like you wouldn’t know what was going on in his head, and then he’d say something,” she tells me, lighting up. “He had this beautiful calm zen energy and then he would just say something so hilarious and goofy. So there was just such a beautiful energy around him that he also beautifully shared with others.”
When Boseman died, Gurira was singularly focused on remembering her friend. She wasn’t entertaining thoughts about the franchise, or what would happen to it going forward. “It wasn’t even a thought in my head about it,” she says. “I was just thinking about losing him.” But when Coogler said that the sequel would be going forward without Boseman, she placed her trust in the director. “I had no doubt that Ryan had a clarity that I really felt came from a connection to him and to his legacy,” she says.
In Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, the character of T’Challa has passed as well. For Gurira and the cast, that meant they had the painful task of showing up every day to mourn the character, while simultaneously mourning their actual friend and colleague. “It’s all about honoring him,” she says.
What is it like to film something like that, when you’re collectively grieving?
“You just never know with grief. When it’s going to pop up, how it’s going to hit you,” Gurira says. “That was one of the key things I learned from going through this process, was how grief gives no warning. But thankfully I was around such an amazing group of people who were really all there for each other, even the new people like Michaela [Coel] and the wonderful Dominique [Thorne] who really understood that they had to really be there for us at times when things were hitting us. So thank God for that.”
While Gurira found solace in her colleagues, they also found a support system in her. Letitia Wright, who plays Shuri, first met Gurira when acting in a London production of Eclipsed. “She was a great strength to me, especially with the loss of our brother,” Wright told me. “She was one of the first people I spoke to on the day that it happened. She was always there for me and always encouraging me.”
Although Marvel plot secrets are kept under tighter guard than some countries’ nuclear launch codes, Gurira shares that Okoye has evolved throughout the course of this movie. “She’s gone through a lot and definitely takes the world on her shoulders,” she says. “She doesn’t really trust anyone else to do the duties that she feels called to do and she goes above and beyond those duties.”
I bring up the ongoing arguments, sparked by disparaging comments from Martin Scorcese, Francis Ford Coppola, and other directors, about whether Marvel movies are cinema – curious to know her thoughts as someone with the unique perspective of being an esteemed playwright and an Avengers star. A flicker of disagreement crosses her face. “Well, I’ve worked very closely with Ryan Coogler. My experience working under his helm, it’s definitely deeply cinematic in every way I can imagine,” Gurira says. “We’re not leaving anything at home. We’re bringing it all. We’re bringing our understanding of our culture, understanding of our humanity, of our gender, of the complexities therein of this world that we’re in, and all the specificities of this world. We have to come in and pour all we’ve got into this franchise. And that’s what we definitely, definitely do. We didn’t get through either movie and be like, ‘Oh, that was nothing.’ No. It was all we had. It was all we had, and then some. So I hope that’s cinema to somebody.”
Gurira is preparing for a spin-off series focused on her Walking Dead character, reprising the role of Michonne after leaving the show in 2020. She’ll be writing and producing it, too – the two sides of her career elegantly combining. Meanwhile, she’s working away on several yet-to-be-announced projects as part of a development deal with ABC, serving as a producer, showrunner, and writer. There is also a rumored Okoye series coming to Disney+ (which, of course, Gurira can neither confirm nor deny).
For now, these seeds are still being tended. “I like to let things incubate, let them become their full thing. There’s a season for growing something, for gestating it and then there’s a season for sharing it. And I just think they’re separate seasons. The things that I’m dealing with now are gestating.”
Regardless of the season, the types of stories she wants to tell, exploring the experiences of African women, remain the same. “Some of it has been accomplished and some of it hasn’t,” she says. “My mission hasn’t changed.”
PRODUCTION CREDITS
Photography by Ashley Peña
Styling by Shibon Kennedy
Tailoring by Iris Taborsky-Tasa
Hair by Vernon Scott
Nails by Tracy Percival
Makeup by Kim Bower using Dior Sauvage Face & Beauty Moisturizer