Mabel Cadena says “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” required “huge work”.
The “Asphalt Goddess” star brings Namora to life in the Marvel sequel to the 2018 flick, which was delayed due to the death of its star, Chadwick Boseman, in 2020 from cancer, “like a MasterClass” because of all the skills she needed to pick up, such as learning new languages and upping her physical fitness.
After being asked what surprised her about the process of making the movie alongside her co-stars, Letitia Wright, Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke and Angela Bassett, the 32-year-old actress told Collider: “Everything. Everything. It’s a surprise because, well, the training, it's huge. It's not easy.
“No, it's like a master class for me because you need focus on every part of your character. It's like, we need training for swimming underwater, for acting underwater, for holding breath.
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“You need to learn Mayan, you need to learn English, you need to learn a lot of things because we have a lot of diversity in the movie. So it's huge work in a movie like this. It's like, ‘Oh my God,” I need more hours in my day.’”
Alex Livinalli, who was being interviewed with Cadena, found the process “pretty different” to what he imagined after he was cast as Attuma.
The 36-year-old actor said: “I'm going to say for me, a point that was very interesting. On my very first day, the first person that I met was Winston, and one of the first things that he said to me was, ‘You're going to read the script. You’re going to think about what you’re doing. You’re going to think about what everything looks like by the description of it, but when you see it, it’s a whole different thing’.
“So most of the things that we shot was green screen, and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, this is going to look like this. This is going to look like that.’”
“But seeing the movie for the first time, it was just like, ‘Wow, this is pretty different than what I had in mind,’” he said.