Letitia Wright

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

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Letitia Wright

When Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was first proposed, no one imagined that the sequel to the huge hit of 2018 was going to be made without its star, Chadwick Boseman, who unexpectedly died in 2020, having kept his battles with colon cancer super-heroically to himself. What to do? Cast someone else in his place? It was an option, and one Boseman’s own brother Derrick suggested, as a memorial to the character Chadwick had played. Or marshal the forces of CG to bring the lead actor back to digital life? For various reasons neither was considered a goer – social media kickback always being an issue. In the end, writer/director Ryan Coogler et al … Read more

The Silent Twins

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June and Jennifer as played by Letitia Wright and Tamara Lawrance

The Silent Twins tells the true story of June and Jennifer Gibbons, twins who grew up in Wales in the 1970s and who refused to speak to anyone except each other. The girls’ lives of withdrawn silence and solitary apartness changed radically when they became teenagers, discovered boys and, after a spree of petty crime mutated into arson, ended up in Broadmoor, the UK’s most notorious high-security psychiatric hospital. Eventually, investigative journalist Marjorie Wallace learned about the twins and started to campaign on their behalf, leading eventually to their release after 11 years of an indefinite sentence (ie they could have remained inside for the rest of their lives). How the hell do … Read more

Small Axe: Mangrove

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The Mangrove Nine in the dock

Small Axe: Mangrove is the first of a series of five standalone films made for the BBC by Steve McQueen. The umbrella title takes its name from the reggae song by Bob Marley (or Lee Perry, depending on who you ask) and though it was originally aimed at the big-name Jamaican music producers muscling everyone else out of the market, it translates perfectly to any underdog story. Mangrove is that story – 1968, Notting Hill in London, before it became the Notting Hill of Hugh Grant/Julia Roberts fame, was a downmarket inner-city area full of fine houses left to rot, crammed with too many tenants, many of them from the West Indies. It … Read more