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THE FIRST PANTHER
INTERVIEW WITH ACTOR KEITH DAVID
Alex Simmons & Travis Langley
Actor Keith David Williams, known professionally as Keith David, was the first person to play the role of T’Challa. Although the Black Panther previously made a nonspeaking appearance in the original X-Men cartoon,1 his true debut came a few weeks later in the Fantastic Four episode, “Prey of the Black Panther,”2 a 1995 retelling of his 1966 comic book introduction.3 In addition to his many live-action roles in films such as The Thing, Barbershop, and Platoon,4 Keith has narrated numerous films including The War,5 and voiced characters in a variety of video games (e.g., Mass Effect6 series) and cartoons (e.g., Gargoyles, Rick and Morty, Todd McFarlane’s Spawn),7 along with many television commercials. You probably know his face, and you certainly know his voice.
Not only was Keith the original voice of T’Challa, but he has also been a vocal supporter for other portrayals of the character. Among other things, he made a YouTube appearance just to say, “Don’t forget to see the Black Panther,”8 encouraging people to see the movie starring Chadwick Boseman.9 The original T’Challa actor shared his experiences with us, along with his thoughts on the nature and importance of the Black Panther character.
VOICE OF THE PANTHER
Alex Simmons: When did you first encounter T’Challa and the Black Panther?
Keith David Williams (actor Keith David): When I was growing up, my best friend owned a comic book store. And the Black Panther was one of the few [Black] characters in comic books. So you know he became somewhat my favorite character. I felt was it was overdue, the whole idea of Wakanda and a Black community and a Black superhero. I was fine with Nick Fury’s …
Alex: If you’re talking about Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, that series from Marvel, the Black character in that was called Gabe. He was a jazz musician, but he was one of the fighting soldiers in that team.10
Keith: That’s the guy, because I played a guy similar to him in a movie called The Fifth Commandment.11 I was a jazz musician. So that [Gabe] set the bar. That would have been in the Sixties.
Alex: Yes. [At that time] Marvel would bundle their books together for the different distributors, and the distributors would receive Spider-Man, Sgt. Fury, and whatever else was in those bundles. And the story is that supposedly when some of those bundles hit the South and the distributors or retailers saw Gabe in that comic, they returned everything. They didn’t just return Sgt. Fury, but they returned everything.
Keith: Really?
Alex: Yes. Not all, but a lot. Enough of them, so I can see where that character would have stood out in your mind.
Keith: It never ceases to amaze me the depths to which racism in this country descends. Or the manifestations of it, you know, just like when you listen to their stories: He [the Black man] was nothing, there was no getting along, no Black and White togetherness at all—which is a fallacy. However, you know there are certain places that would have you believe that when things seemed to be doing better, it really wasn’t. So then, few people can even fathom in a comic book, a Black man having any class or dignity whatsoever.
Alex: Or value even, right!
Keith: Yes, or value. I mean that’s amazing to me, because that’s definitely a taught mentality. It’s something you have to learn. It’s not only something that you have to learn, it’s something that has to be reinforced within your closest environment. That is to say, at home.
Alex: Well certainly when you’re growing up, you’re in your most vulnerable developmental stages.
Keith: That’s when you learn that lesson. I had a great affinity for my grandfather. I’m named David after my grandfather. If he had harbored any “isms” that he would have deigned to pass onto me—which he did not—I probably would have adopted them and probably would have nurtured them, because they were his and because of me wanting to be like him, to emulate him.
Alex: He was your role model.
Keith: Right. You know it’s like these people who insist upon keeping statues of scumbag war heroes in the South, because you say you’re a historian. Well, most of these guys were just racist; they weren’t heroes. They just wanted to keep the status quo the way it was, let it all be White, and anybody else, the hell with them.
Alex: It’s funny that you bring that up. I feel the Black Panther also challenges people’s conceptions of heroes. What is a hero? Are they favoring the heroes, like the ones you and I probably encountered when we were growing up, both historical as well as fictional, or the antiheroes? When you were growing up, you were seeing Gabe in the Howling Commandos, you were also seeing T’Challa in some of the Marvel comics. Was the impact on you at that time significant? Or as a kid at that time, were you just thinking, this was cool? How do you remember that?
Keith: I would have to say it was probably more “cool” than I would register any grand significance. But you know, that certainly turned into being both cool and significant, you know what I mean. But I can’t say I really grew up with any “shame in my game.” I never not wanted to be Black. There was a time I can remember when people were talking about it, and there were such negative connotations around being Black that I certainly wish that [the negativity] wasn’t so. But in my house, my father was a pretty militant guy as far as “Black Power” and owning your blackness in a way that again “no shame in the game.”
Alex: How did you go from that into pursuing an acting career? Was it something you always wanted to do? Or was it inspired by something in particular?
Keith: I wanted to be an actor my whole life. I don’t even know why I wanted to be an actor. I wanted to be a preacher, I wanted to be a pediatrician when I saw roles that I liked. And I feel very strongly that acting is a calling, like ministry. And people come to it for different reasons. Like my desire to be a preacher. I just felt that God wanted me to be an actor, and that’s what I wanted to do. And like ministry, if I play a character within a story, that makes you want to be like him or that makes you not want to be like him, well, again that’s ministry.
Alex: You’re influencing your audience in one way or another, so absolutely, you’re speaking to them and you’re bringing a message to them. Whether or not they become engaged and pulled into the story, that speaks to the merit of that delivery.
Keith: And that brings us back to T’Challa. I mean somebody has nobility and then regard for his people. Someone who has the desire to do the right thing and the next rightest thing and the next, for all people involved. And to learn that it’s not just about my people.
Alex: Did the Black Panther character stay with you during your growing-up years? Were you still reading comics, or did you move away from that?
Keith: I sort of dropped off of my comic book reading after I went to college.
Alex: Once you got to college, you gave up on reading comics and you began pursuing your acting career. At what point did you find yourself back with the Black Panther? How did that happen?
Keith: There was a brother who was a Black producer on one of the cartoon networks.
Alex: Dwayne McDuffie.
Keith: Yeah, so he wanted to introduce the Black Panther, and we talked about if we could make him an animated series. He thought the world wasn’t ready for that at that time, so it never happened, but how wonderful that it did finally come to fruition. And it couldn’t have been better portrayed than by Chadwick Boseman. He’s just wonderful.
Keith: I loved it. It was wonderful! And he was phenomenal. He really embraces that character quite wonderfully and Michael [B. Jordan] playing his nemesis was also wonderful. He was also quite brilliant.
Alex: You did voice the Black Panther in an episode of the Fantastic Four animated series. When you did that, how did you approach the role? How did you feel about it?
Keith: I was honored to be able do it. I mean, here I am voicing the Black Panther for the first time. Again, I really wanted to make more of it, but it wasn’t the time. And then a few years later, I got to do Goliath in Gargoyles. He wasn’t the Black Panther, but he was a man of color.
Alex: Yes, whether people thought of it that way or not, absolutely.
Keith: The truth of the matter is, inherently, yes, we’re all human beings. We’re all one human race, we all come from different cultures, and we come from a magnificent mixture of cultures, where climate, environment, and other things cause us to have different habits and customs. And I think, inherently, like the first Americans, we are far more welcoming by nature. Inherent in the White man’s history, he’s always trying to conquer somebody. As if his own, wherever that is, is not enough. You say that, and then there are people who say, well, Africans sold Africans to other countries. And, yes, there have always been warring factions within the same culture. But you can’t compare the American slave trade to any other form of slavery in the world. It was the worst aberration of all.
Alex: Let’s look at the power of the image of Wakanda and T’Challa as a superhero. It’s not like Superman, where there’s no Krypton any more. Here you have T’Challa, who’s come to the United States, is seen as a superhero alongside the Fantastic Four and the Avengers, and then he goes home, back to his kingdom, the most technologically advanced in existence. He’s also wealthy, so much so that he once bought out Tony Stark in a particular deal.12 So do you feel that this kind of imagery in the real world you’re talking about is viewed—as a threat or a titillation? Or do you feel some people just don’t know what to do with that imagery?
Keith: They don’t know what to do with that. How fantastic is that? How wonderful is that? It’s like how they tried to undermine the technological advances of the Egyptians and the Black people in Africa or all over Africa, in other forms of historical documentation. Whenever the White man came across a culture that was in any way, shape, or form advanced, especially above the barbaric Anglo-Saxon culture where they were still—
Alex: And throwing the sewage out the window.
Keith: And others were doing brain surgeries in Egypt. Anytime they came across that, they wanted to undermine that somehow in their written documentation. By nature, any explorer is unique, there’s not a whole lot of people doing that, so they [the public] have to take your [the explorer’s] word for it. So depending on the prejudice of the explorer, that’s the history that you got. You got his story. Far too many times, it was far from objective; in fact, there was nothing objective about it.
Alex: As I understand the history, it was Jack Kirby who created the Black Panther and a lot of the world of Wakanda. I’m sure Stan Lee collaborated on the project, because that’s what Stan often did. And I know they received some pushback from some executives. But it was most certainly Stan who got the project out to the world, because he was a showman. He was the P. T. Barnum of comics.
And so, we have this, and we look at how it’s transpired, and how it’s influenced people over the years. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to have your take on the character, and your experience with him as well. Earlier, you talked about the movie. Do you think you would have any more involvement in the Black Panther world in some way? Or would you like to?
Keith: I hope to God they ask me to do something in the Black Panther. I want to have some part in it.
Alex: One of the things I liked about the film was developed in the comic books. The Black Panther character showed up in a lot of the Avengers and the Fantastic Four comics as another character without full stories and issues on his own, initially. When writer Don McGregor had a shot to take over the Black Panther, one of the many things he did was make sure the women in his stories were strong characters. Over the years, between writers Reggie Hudlin and Christopher Priest, we have Shuri, the Panther’s sister.13 She even earned her way into becoming the Black Panther in one storyline.14 In the movie we have his girlfriend who is a very capable spy, his mother, and the women warriors who protect T’Challa. So what do you think is the impact of seeing so many strong Black women, affecting the world in and outside of Wakanda?
Keith: As you say yourself, it has done wonders for the image and stereotype of what Black women are capable of. They were beautiful, and they were badass!! And, I think you know, I cannot commend them [various creators] enough for changing that paradigm. They definitely initiated a paradigm shift and we can’t go back from that. Nobody wants to go back from that. That was powerful! That was beyond powerful; it was empowering. And oh my God, it’s a beautiful, beautiful thing what they did. Whoever initiated it, my hat is off to them, and for the continuance. As for Ryan Coogler, I hope I get my opportunity to work with him again someday because I just think he’s just fantastic.
I’d like to see more Black Panther–type characters developed and nurtured, brought to fruition. Because we need them; White people need them. White people need to know that the old history that they learned from their grandfathers, a lot was false, and that if it wasn’t for the Black man in America, there would be no America as we know it. Bringing forth the truth—there is nothing more powerful than that. Jesus said, “The truth will set you free!”15 I mean, that’s an edict from God! That’s not even man-sourced, that’s God-sourced. The truth will set you free. That’s the real deal.
NOTES
1. X-Men, episode 4–06, “Sanctuary, Part One” (October 21, 1995).
2. Fantastic Four, episode 2–07, “Prey of the Black Panther” (November 11, 1995).
3. Fantastic Four #52 (1966).
4. As Childs in The Thing (1982 motion picture); Lester Simmons in Barbershop (2002 motion picture); King in Platoon (1986 motion picture).
5. The War (2007 documentary).
6. As David Anderson, beginning with Mass Effect (2007 video game).
7. As Goliath, beginning with Gargoyles, episode 1–01, “Awakening, Part 1” (October 24, 1994); the President, beginning with Rick and Morty, episode 2–05, “Get Schwifty (August 23, 2015); Al Simmons/Spawn, beginning with Todd McFarlane’s Spawn, episode 1–01, “Burning Visions” (May 16, 1997).
8. Relentless (2018).
9. Black Panther (2018 motion picture).
10. The character Gabriel Jones first appeared in Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos #1 (1963).
11. He played Max “Coolbreeze” Templeton in The Fifth Commandment (2008 motion picture).
12. Black Panther #42–43 (2002).
13. Hudlin introduced Shuri in Black Panther #4 (2005).
14. Black Panther #5 (2009).
15. John 8:32.