“If you are asked to do a movie and they say there’s water, hang up,” jokes costume designer Ruth E. Carter when I ask her about her experience on the long-awaited Marvel sequel Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
Carter won the costume-design Oscar for her work on 2018’s Black Panther, creating vibrant Afrofuturistic designs for inhabitants of the powerful country of Wakanda. So it would seem that no task would be too difficult for Carter in the follow-up. That was until Ryan Coogler came to her in the summer of 2020 and let her know that the sequel would introduce a new community, the Talokanil, a group of underwater-dwellers inspired by Mesoamerican cultures.
“There were so many beautiful visuals in the aquatic life, with fish fins and coral,” Carter says. “And as we dove into the culture, also there was a plethora of beauty to examine.”
Carter was deep into research, reading and talking to historians and other experts about Mayan, Aztec, and Guatemalan history, when Chadwick Boseman died in August of 2020. The devastating loss meant the filmmakers had to figure out a way to tell the next chapter of Wakanda’s story without him. “Ryan Coogler became our hero in a sense that it was his decision whether we would continue. It was his decision how this story was going to play out,” says Carter. “And he had to figure this out through his own grief of losing his friend. We all lost a friend.”
Wakanda Forever, which opened in theaters November 11, is both a tribute to Boseman and an ambitious expansion on the world created in the first movie. This time, we see the kingdom of Wakanda mourning the loss of its leader, but soon needing to gather its strength to defend against threats on their nation, including from Namor (Tenoch Huerta), the mutant leader of the aquatic nation of Talokan.
With the return of much of the original cast, including Letitia Wright as Shuri, Lupita Nyong’o as Nakia, and Angela Bassett as Queen Ramonda, Wakanda Forever also expands the kingdom of Wakanda, pushing Carter to upgrade and reinvent designs for familiar characters as well. Here, Carter dives in on her approach to Wakanda, Queen Ramonda, and a whole new underwater world.
WAKANDA 2.0
Carter knew early on that the essence of many of the characters’ looks from the original would return, but the designs would be very new and different. “Ryan said like, ‘Whenever I see a Batman film, the suit is different. The suit is new. It’s still Batman, but there’s this fresh new thing that’s being presented,’” she says, adding that a lot of thought had to go into what a new Black Panther suit (worn by a different character) would look like.
Because many of the battle scenes take place in the water, Wakanda Forever would also introduce Wakanda’s navy. “I was like, ‘Hello! There was no navy in the first film,’” Carter says with a laugh. She not only had to design what the navy’s uniform would look like, but also come up with different ranks and how that would be illustrated in the clothing.
Rebecca Ford
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