The first time we interviewed legendary costume designer Ruth E. Carter, it was in anticipation of the 2018 release of Black Panther, the Marvel blockbuster that brought her a long-deserved Academy Award and catapulted its lead actor, Chadwick Boseman, to international fame. It was the duo’s second consecutive film, having also worked together on 2017’s Marshall, where Boseman played the titular role of Thurgood Marshall.
Carter recounted the story of her meeting and subsequent creative collaboration with Boseman, who died in August of colon cancer, in a heartfelt tribute published by the Guardian on Saturday.
“On the first day of filming on Marshall I found out that I would be designing for Black Panther, which meant we’d be working together again,” she wrote. “I wondered if I should tell him, but I decided not to. Around two weeks before we finished, I finally told him, and he said: ‘Oh, I already knew.’”
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Recalling the late actor’s first fitting for the role of Thurgood Marshall, she wrote:
…I showed him images and black-and-white videos of people in the 40s doing the lindy hop and going out partying. He started doing some of his James Brown moves [from 2014’s Get on Up] in the room, to get us into the mood—I was amazed at his dancing abilities. Thurgood Marshall would have had the tie and the pinstripe double-breasted suit and the pocket squares, so I put all of those things on Chadwick and he started to embody, maybe for the first time, what he was feeling about the character. It was wonderful to work with someone who wanted to connect costume to character like that.
Boseman’s death was a shock to all but his closest friends and family, as it was revealed he’d been living with what began as a Stage 3 diagnosis since 2016. During that time, he made seven films, cementing his status as one of Hollywood’s most talented actors, but as Carter and others have noted, he was also emotionally intelligent.
“He was a very thoughtful person, and quiet, but not necessarily reserved,” she wrote. “Once you asked him a question, he was an open book, but he wasn’t volunteering the information, probably because he wanted to hear what you had to say.”
Boseman was also entirely committed to his craft, and to the collaborative process that is filmmaking. Sharing various anecdotes from their time working together, Carter explained that Boseman was always a gracious participant in the process.
