I meet Letitia Wright on what I will later realise is the last day of summer. The preceding week was rain-sodden and the days following were swept up in a bit-ing wind. But on that late August afternoon at London’s Southbank Centre, a dense heat is driving adults into the shady spots formed by the building’s brutalist architecture, while children run through the galleries’ dancing fountains.
And then Wright shows up, wearing a full Wales Bonner tracksuit; a harbinger of the weather to come. At her suggestion, we’re meeting here to see the works of the Bahamian conceptual artist Tavares Strachan. Across several rooms, the enigmatically titled exhibition ‘There Is Light Somewhere’ features a sprawling collection of collages, sculptures and soundscapes. It pays homage to Black icons such as Nina Simone and Harriet Tubman, but the most poignant works explore lesser-known figures who have been forgotten or obscured throughout history. As such, invisibility is a key theme. Who gets to be remembered and who becomes invisible?
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These are the kinds of questions also fuelling Letitia Wright’s work. In the spring of 2020, deep in lockdown, when most of us were watching The Sopranos reruns and baking banana bread, Wright was in the process of launching her own production company. ‘I wanted to have a seat at the table,’ she says, ‘even if it’s a table that’s going to take a few years to develop and mature. I just wanted my own table.’ In the years since, she’s begun writing and directing her own short films, the most recent being Highway to the Moon, which is ‘a story about Black boys’.
We enter the gallery and are greeted by a series of striking collages. Colourful and vivid, basketball players and astronauts appear alongside historical figures. ‘That is Mary Seacole,’ whispers Wright as she interrogates one of the pieces. In another room, we discover Strachan’s Encyclopedia of Invisibility. The artist created his own A-Z: 2,400 pages of overlooked stories and hidden histories. Every page has been pasted across the four walls of the room. You could spend hours in there and barely get past the letter ‘B’.
There are two types of people at exhibitions: the first kind wander around aimlessly, stopping at the pieces that catch their eye in some way while flicking through the programme; then there are those who do everything they can to take the whole thing in. They pause in front of each work, take pictures, explore it from different angles and read the wall texts.
Wright sits in the latter camp. Being in a gallery with her feels exhilarating. She’s like a child in a playground; we are looking at the same thing, but she is creating worlds around each image and installation. ‘This is sparking so many ideas,’ she whispers to me conspiratorially, as we stand in front of a huge neon sign illuminating a passage from James Baldwin.
After an hour and a half, I start getting texts from the restaurant we’re meant to be going to about cancelling our reservation. I reluctantly ask Wright if she’s ready to leave and she agrees. As we walk towards the exit, we suddenly spot a final installation in a side room: a huge expanse of dried grass that transforms the space into a meadow. In the centre is a towering ceramic sculpture. Wright stops to look inits direction. She glances back at me, grins and then sprints towards the work, returning a few minutes later. ‘Sorry, we can go now – I’ll come back in my own time.’ It’s one moment of many that I find myself laughing at the 30-year-old this afternoon, such is her childlike sense of awe and her playful, irreverent humour.
It’s not what I expected from a celebrity of her stature. Lowkey as she comes across, Wright is one of the defining talents of her generation. As a star of Marvel’s Black Panther franchise, Wright made history in 2018 when she brought one of the first Black comic-book superheroes in the US to life. She plays Shuri, a princess, but not the kind that needs to fall in love or be rescued. As Wakanda’s chief scientist, she is quick-witted and fiercely intelligent –and Wright’s effortless performance has since inspired a whole generation of women to take up careers in STEM.
Wright would later go on to make history again when her character Shuri became the new Black Panther in the second instalment, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, following the untimely death of the first film’s star, Chadwick Boseman. Writer and director Ryan Coogler said grief would be a central theme. With a cast and crew in mourning, it permeated every scene, as Wakanda’s matriarchy is forced to step up and protect the nation in the wake of King T’Challa’s death. It’s a beautiful portrait of power, love and loss, and a striking tribute to Boseman. The trailer garnered 172 million views in its first 24 hours online, while the film landed four Oscar nominations. The franchise – with a third movie rumoured to be in the pipe-line – has generated billions of pounds in revenue, while establishing Wright and her cast mates as household names.
Even outside of the Marvel universe, Wright had been quietly building her CV as an emerging luminary of British cinema. I first met her seven years ago for an interview about her breakout role in 2015’s Urban Hymn. A low-budget indie film, Wright played a troubled teen and gifted singer navigating the foster-care system. Even then, her talent as an actor was undeniable, raw and moving, but never overstated. She’d just been selected by Bafta as one of their Breakthrough Brits of 2015. In 2019, Bafta called again, this time with a Rising Star award. She received an Emmy nomination for her stand-out appearance in an episode of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, while her performances in Channel 4’s I am Danielle and Steve McQueen’s anthology, Small Axe, are masterclasses in acting. Wright is a truly voracious talent who approaches each character with emotional intelligence.
As we leaf through the menu, I know that I’m sitting with an intimidatingly successful superstar, but there’s something so deeply chill about Letitia Wright. ‘I learned a lot today,’ she says as we order food. ‘It was about Black heroes. I didn’t know about certain figures like…’She checks an image on her phone.‘Robert Henry Lawrence Jr, the first Blackman in space.’ The celestial is one of the many inspirations behind Wright’s next project, Highway to the Moon.
Learning to run a production company hasn’t been easy. ‘My grandma used to say to me, “You need to have thick skin”. I’droll my eyes because I was so sensitive. But as I get older, I understand what she means.You have to let things roll off.’ Still, the stakes are high because Highway to the Moon was inspired by a real and tragic story. ‘I have a friend that I went to college with. Her little brother, Junior, was stabbed at a party in Finsbury Park. I watched the pro-cess of the family trying to figure out who murdered him, asking people to come forward, and nobody did,’ she says. ‘I knew this kid, he was only 20. I wondered about his spirit. Where are his dreams? Where are his aspirations? Do they just evaporate as he leaves?’
As with acting, Wright only wants to work on projects with purpose. She knows the topic of knife crime is a complicated and painful one. ‘You have to think about how people will feel watching it,’ she says.‘But Junior’s not coming back. Either we keep acting like it’s not happening or we look at it through a different lens.’ Jeanne Applegate, an editor who shares her deep passion for the project, is now on board. ‘Women have rescued this film,’ she says. Despite accruing a steady string of accolades since 2015, success didn’t come overnight. Wright says she wouldn’t have it any other way, and brims with enthusiasm while listing her smallest, earliest roles:a part in a commercial that never saw the light of day, and playing an extra in Attack the Block, starring her childhood friend, John Boyega. ‘I cherished all of those moments as opportunities to learn,’ she says. She credits her school drama teacher with see-ing potential in her before Wright had ever considered acting. ‘She said to me, “Come to drama club!” I was like, “OK!”’
At the time, Wright had only recently moved to the UK from Guyana. ‘It’s been beautiful to be in a country where my dreams could align before I even knew what they were.’ She went on to attend Identity School of Acting, one of the UK’s only part-time drama schools and an institution renowned for churning out stars, from Michaela Coel to Ambika Mod and Regé-Jean Page. Although living in London crystallised her career, Wright has a complicated relationship with her now-home. ‘Seeing the way your parents are treated, parents with degrees and an education…’ She trails off. ‘When your parents are immigrants, they’re going to be treated differently in a lot of situations, no matter their qualifications. I got a mad education about the world we live in and how biased it is.’In 2016, during a difficult period of her life, Wright started attending church. ‘I’m really happy that I was able to commit to it. My religion allows me to see the industry differently and understand where my opportunities come from.’ Her faith helped her overcome a bout of intense anxiety ahead of her first Black Panther audition with Chadwick Boseman, her future on-screen brother. ‘I knew that if it was meant for me, then it would fall into place. I metChad that day, he was wearing a greenT-shirt, drinking a smoothie, muscles out and I just knew, that’s my brother. There was something about him.’
Her faith is front and centre in her first executive producer role, Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot, out this month. The film follows the true story of a church in East Texas, in which 22 families adopted 77 children from the local foster system, creating a nationwide adoption drive. Wright spent years working behind the scenes, embedding herself in the community and giving notes on the script. It is a beautiful film that became an unexpected hit in the US, but its success has been marred with controversy after being promoted by a right-wing site. On the day of its release, the Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh wrote on social media, ‘leftists are trying to stop Christians from saving children’, and criticised states blocking adoptions by parents who reject gender transitions. Wright, who had not been informed about the partnership with The Daily Wire, took to Instagram to vent her frustration with people using the film for ‘divisive political purposes’. ‘I worked on it for four years, I know the team so intimately,’ she says, ‘then you have a team that haven’t been there for all that. If you are going to join which was not my decision – please just stick to the kids. I wanted to see kids be rescued. It was not about anything else.’
I ask if the promotional part of the job comes less easily to Wright. ‘The only thing that’s sometimes overwhelming is you can’t control what people think about you. You have to be mature enough to say, “this is not the truth. I love you, and I’m walking away from you”.’ I tell her that sounds much easier said than done, and she smiles. ‘Therapy, good friends, my faith. When I have a bad day – and bad days do come – I’m able to get out of it quicker with those tools.’
Wright enjoys promoting her films: ‘It’s an opportunity to share and celebrate a project.’ The conversation shifts to red carpets and her enduring love of fashion. ‘My number-one fear is, will I fall on this here carpet? High heels are still tough, but my style has definitely evolved. At the start, it was atrocious!’ A long-time fan of Prada, she says starring in their AW24 campaign, alongside Damson Idris, HarrisDickinson and Hunter Schafer, was ‘ultra cool’, and praises Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons as ‘dope’ for supporting artists.
At the 2022 premiere for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Wright honoured the late Chadwick Boseman by wearing a black Alexander McQueen suit with a crystal harness, echoing Boseman’s crystal-embroidered Givenchy suit at the 2018Oscars. As we talk about the power of fashion, it is Wright who alerts me that we’re meeting exactly four years to the day since her friend and co-star’s death. ‘It’s still so strange to be on this side of it,’ she says.
Grief seems to have found a way of emerging through Wright’s work: the mourning Shuri in Wakanda Forever, a poignant scene in Possum Trot, a recent short she made called Things I Never Told My Father, as well as the upcoming Highway to the Moon. ‘It’s funny, because when I was making Things I Never Told My Father in 2020, Chadwick was still alive. Then he passed and I couldn’t look at the film. I couldn’t do anything. It took me a while to get back into editing. Someone watched a cut of Highway to the Moon and said, “I feel like [the lead character] Micah is very connected to your grief. I didn’t realise –but he’s the person that I am writing and he does have a bit of me in him. Grief takes a lot of time and space to process.
As we say our goodbyes, I think back to the Tavares Strachan artwork Wright was transfixed by: a James Baldwin quote in neon lights that reads: ‘It is necessary, while in darkness, to know that there is a light somewhere, to know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is a light.’
Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot is out October 11. This article appears in the November issue of ELLE UK.
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