Michael B. Jordan needed THERAPY after Black Panther
Black Panther star Michael B. Jordan has revealed to Oprah Winfrey during a SuperSoul Conversation toping that he went to therapy after playing Killmonger.
The 31-year-old opened up about how he spent 'a lot of time alone; before and during filming the Oscar-nominated Marvel flick, and admitted that he found it 'tough to readjust to people caring about me".
He added how valuable it was to "be in this lonely place as long as I could" for the film; "I started talking to people, started unpacking a little bit. I was by myself, isolating myself. I figured Erik Killmonger's childhood growing up was lonely."
He described his character's solitary and angry upbringing after the murder of his father;
"He didn’t have a lot of people he could talk to about this place called Wakanda that didn’t exist,’ he added. "It was a little tough for me at first. Readjusting to people caring about me, getting that love that I shut out. I shut out love, I didn’t want love."
He described how therapy helped him to progress past those feelings, and called on men to remember it’s more than okay to do so.
"Your mind is so powerful. Your mind will get your body past a threshold that it would have given up on way before,’" he said. "Honestly, therapy, just talking to somebody just helped me out a lot. As a man, you get a lot of slack for it, I don’t really subscribe to that. Everyone needs to unpack and talk."
The ground-breaking movie has an all-star predominantly black cast, and is nominated for seven Academy Awards; it's also the first superhero film to be nominated for Best Picture ever.
Michael's character is presumed to be dead, but a body was never recovered, leaving that spot open for a sequel return.
Angela Bassett, who played Ramonda, was asked if ‘everybody’ would be coming back for Black Panther 2 on SAGs red carpet: "I would assume so… We didn’t see him Killmonger go into the ocean did we?"
The film has become a hugely important cultural milestone for cinema, with the cast winning outstanding performance in a motion picture at the SAG Awards.
Chadwick Boseman, who plays Black Panther, delivered a rousing acceptance speech expressing the value of being "young, gifted and black";
"We all know what it’s like to be told that there is not a place for you to be featured, yet you are young, gifted and black. ‘We know what it’s like to be told there’s not a screen for you to be featured on, a stage for you to be featured on."
The 41-year-old concluded;
"We knew that we had something special that we wanted to give the world, that we could be full human beings in the roles that we were playing, that we could create a world that exemplified a world that we wanted to see."
Feature image: moviedash.com
