Enemies & Enemies: Winston Duke & Andy Serkis

Winston Duke is a tall drink of water. That’s not really saying a lot when I only clock in at 5′ 2″, but he is. Andy Serkis is not nearly as tall, but his presence fills the room right up as he enters the door and casually starts up a conversation with me as if he isn’t the megastar that he is. I look him firmly in the eye and tell him that he’s usually the CGI guy that we love to be annoyed by, but I’m happy that in Black Panther, we get to see his full face, even if he’s still a major annoyance. Both Duke and Serkis play antagonists in Black Panther, and they play them well. You’ll remember Serkis as Klaue from his introduction as the vibranium stealing arms dealer in Avengers Age of Ultron. His arm is sliced off with little regard by Ultron, and we’re not really sure of his status. We do care, because we know that Klaue is an integral connection between Captain America, Wakanda and Black Panther. You soon learn why in the introduction of Black Panther, and well, yeah, you keep Serkis on your love to hate list.

Duke is another story. He’s a leader of a tribe in Wakanda and he’s an antagonist that you’re not quite sure you SHOULD hate, but you do. You don’t hate his reasoning, but he’s a cocky something or another, and well, you’ll just have to watch the movie to see what else he has in store. He doesn’t mind talking over others he deems beneath him, and in a way, you’ll find yourself completely here for him. Kind of. Given that this is his very first film, he blows the role as a cocky antagonist out of the water. He also does a MEAN impression of Ryan Coogler,

We got to sit down with the pair for a roundtable interview and the conversation was DEEP. I’m at fault for asking a question that required an answer FULL of spoilers – my bad colleagues – but I’ll share that with you after the film has been out for a bit of time.

Instead, here are the things we discussed, and some great eye-candy of a cleaned up thuggish looking Serkis and hide-wrapped Duke.

On how it feels to play a bad guy

AS: Being able to dip into the dark side in a safe space is great. Klaue is not a general archetypal villain. He’s purely selfish – while being THE WORST – but strangely, he might be someone that you may want to hang out with. He’s not completely a baddie, but he’s someone that challenges the battle between good and evil. I wanted to make him complex since we’re all on the spectrum. No one is completely evil – because they have the ability to love, and no one is completely good – because they have the ability to do bad things – I want him to be complex, and still show him having a good time as well.

WD: M’Baku isn’t a leader of a religious cult, he’s one of an established grounded tribe. I was given the opportunity to create a new language within that world essentially. And the one thing that Marvel did great that really grounded and created a new world, a new life for M’Baku was that it was a departure from the comics in a sense that it’s no longer this M’Baku being the leader of this religious minority. So that gives you a lot more agency, it gives you a lot more presence, it gives you a lot more strength and ability within that world. And creating that society that lives outside of Wakanda proper was something that was really great. I kind of want them to have this calm response nature and I want this to be present. And you go off and you study this and study that and bring it back and he’s like

“yeah-yeah-yeah cool- cool- cool- cool- cool- cool- cool- I think I’m going to use that yeah. I like that I like that.“

So he exhibited a lot of trust when it came to us and he exhibited- it was very much a collaborative space. So you’d go in there and you’d try some things out and it would work and it felt very safe.

Marvel Studios’ BLACK PANTHER Center: M’Baku (Winston Duke) Ph: Film Frame ©Marvel Studios 2018

This is the absolute perfect cast for this movie, how were you cast?

AS: Well so Ulysses Klaue comes into the world, the Marvel world in Age of Ultron, in The Avengers: Age of Ultron. And at that point he’s working off a ship in India where he is selling- he’s an arms dealer basically, he’s an arms dealer gangster. And at that point he’s amassing a huge quantity of vibranium and then Ultron tracks him down and he loses some of it. So it was teased in. And in fact- the way that I came on board actually was when I first started working with Joss Whedon who’s directing Avengers Age of Ultron, it was using performance capture, it was actually I was helping Mark Ruffalo with the Hulk. Because they came to our studio in London called the Imaginarium and we were working with him and then James Spader to create the character Ultron

because it was using the technology that I’m very familiar with. And then Josh said oh man there’s this great character which I’d really love you to play, it’s only a small scene. But I think if the Black Panther movie comes on, you know, he’s very much an adversary for T’Challa in the Black Panther and I said oh wow that’s great. And it was just this very quirky like you say kind of idiosyncratic slightly left field gangster character. But which- so that’s how the character got introduced. And then when Ryan took it on in this, he just wanted to have even more fun with it. So it was- that was my way into it. How about you?

WD: I think I went through- since I was more of a unnamed actor, and I went through the standard audition process. So I was the audience. So I’m only hearing about Black Panther and seeing the cast come together and they’re like oh my god, Chadwick Boseman I’m like Chadwick Boseman and then it’s Michael B. Jordan, I’m like Michael B. Jordan is in it too? And then they announced Lupita Nyong’o. And then they’re like Danai has joined the cast. I’m like Danai has joined the cast and it just kept going and going and I just- I wanted to- I told my representatives, I said I’d just love to get in that room. I love Ryan Coogler’s work, I think it has a really strong sense of social justice, every single thing that he does. And I want my career to have a strong social justice footprint, even if it is commercial. I want it to be connected in some ways so I kind of expressed that mission for myself and my career. And then lo and behold I got in the room with him, he had me do it like twenty different ways and he’s like

“cool cool cool, can you make it a little bit more personal, personal, can you make it more personal“

But he just kept going more personal more personal, we do it, we did it another way we did it another way we did it another way we did it another way. Change the lines here change the lines there. He wrote sides specifically just for the audition. And we just kept going and going and going and I didn’t hear

back for maybe four weeks. So I was like that was fun, I got to work with him, you know, I actually got to work with him. Because this took like forty five minutes, to go through the whole process. So I was content and then I got another call and they’re, they really like you and they’re asking more questions.

And they want to test you. I go and I do the test and it just felt very organic, I got home, I said a prayer, I heard a voice say everything is going to be cool. You’re all good, don’t worry about it. And the rest is history.

How does it feel to see the fan engagement all over the world, especially with those smaller parts?

WD: Well for me a major thing especially after watching the film last night is an excitement, it’s an excitement to know that people and not adults but children are going to be exposed to narratives like this. Before they’re fully developed and before they’ve ingested and consumed placed narratives, narratives that were formed before they were born about them, and they’re getting to see representations of people who look exactly like them. Before they’re fully formed, which is going to help them see their world differently. It’s going to change their paradigm from a really young age and they’re going to be consuming this in a way that they’re not seeing, I hope a four year old isn’t watching this, even though they might be watching this with an awareness of race. But they might be and that’s just the world we live in. But for them to- if they do have an awareness, a fully developed or an idea of race. And they’re watching this and going man I could be like that and man T’Challa looks like my uncle, man T’Challa looks my cousin, Michael B. Jordan looks my dad, Winston looks my dad Winston looks like my cousin, Winston looks like me and they’re getting to see that. And children in Tobago are getting to see that,

people in Trinidad, people in Brazil, people in Latin America, people all over the diaspora are going to get to see this and develop agency. That’s exciting. And I was just watching and being like, this is wonderful, it’s a great time to be in a super hero movie. And the movie itself is a super hero, it took on its own life.

Black Panther hits theaters February 16 – snag your tickets today before it’s too late!