He barely moved up on that Hall H stage. No fist pump, no big wave to the crowd. Just a guy in his early thirties, born and raised in London, trained at RADA, standing there while two thousand people who wouldn’t have picked him out of a lineup forty-eight hours earlier lost their minds.
David Jonsson. Ryan Coogler had just handed him the heaviest crown in Hollywood, flanked by Letitia Wright and Winston Duke.
“Thank you, Ryan. Thank you, Kevin. Thank you to this amazing family that I have the honour and privilege and the blessing to join,” Jonsson said. Then he just stopped and looked out at the crowd for a second, like he was deciding how much to give them.
“I don’t want to say too much because I want to let the screen do the talking.” – David Jonsson
That screen’s still blank. Doesn’t open until December 15, 2028. And when it finally does, the story underneath it isn’t really about a king who died — it’s about the son he never got to raise.
How Marvel Solved a Problem It Never Wanted
Chadwick Boseman died on August 28, 2020. Forty-three years old. Colon cancer, working on him quietly for years while almost nobody around him had a clue — not his wife, not his trainer, not even his own director on set.
“He didn’t tell me. You talk about grace under pressure, that’s the definition.” – Denzel Washington
Kevin Feige’s statement at the time read like the kind studios put out when nothing’s actually been decided yet: “To honour the legacy that Chad helped us build, we want to continue to explore the world of Wakanda.” Somewhere behind that sentence, a room full of people was quietly running the math on every option they had.
They ended up going with a third path nobody quite expected. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever didn’t recast T’Challa. It let him die on screen, gave Shuri the space to grieve and rage against the world, and by the end handed her the mantle herself. $859.2 million worldwide. An Oscar for Ruth E. Carter’s costume work.
The real move, though, came after the credits. Nakia — played by Lupita Nyong’o — sitting with a young boy on a beach in Haiti.
“His Wakandan name is T’Challa,” she tells him. “But you can call him Toussaint.”
Nobody clocked it at the time, but that was the whole plan. A son the king never got to meet. A way to keep the bloodline going without technically writing the father out of the story.
Six years pass. That boy grows up. And now he’s a man standing in front of a screaming Comic-Con crowd holding a billion-dollar franchise in his hands.
The Résumé That Got Him Here
Jonsson didn’t just appear out of thin air for this. RADA, class of 2016. From there, HBO’s Industry, playing Gus Sackey, a young Black banker getting chewed up by London finance. The charming lead in Rye Lane. Andy, the synthetic human in Alien: Romulus — a performance sharp enough to land him the BAFTA Rising Star Award in 2025. Most recently, The Long Walk, opposite Cooper Hoffman, playing a teenager walking, quite literally, toward his own death.
“The first film I saw that made me think I want to act was Malcolm X,” he’s said. “Yeah, it was Denzel [Washington] in Malcolm X.”
Short résumé so far. Wide range for how short it is — banker, romantic lead, machine, condemned teenager, and now a prince. As Jonsson himself put it: “Every character I do, no matter what, I’m going to be a Black man first.”
There’s an irony sitting in the middle of all this that nobody’s really avoiding. A British actor with Nigerian roots is taking over the most recognizable Black American superhero since Blade. Some fans were thrilled. A lot weren’t, and the anger online kept circling back to the same question: why not Damson Idris, why not John Boyega, why not somebody American?
Except Idris is British too. So is Boyega. And T’Challa was never American to begin with — he’s the king of a country that only exists on a movie screen.
What people were actually upset about had less to do with passports and more to do with ownership — who gets to claim this version of Blackness, who’s earned the right to wear it. Boseman was American, and for a lot of fans that made him feel like theirs. Jonsson doesn’t carry that same claim in their eyes, fair or not.
One outlet put it plainly: the backlash has less to do with representation than with gatekeeping wearing representation’s clothes.
Why the Internet Immediately Picked a Side
The reaction online went exactly the way these things go — loud, split down the middle, not much patience left for anyone trying to slow it down.
Plenty of people were happy about it. “David Jonsson as T’Challa Jr is such great news, absolutely amazing actor,” one fan wrote. Somebody else called it inspired casting, full stop, no notes.
Other corners were furious. “Jonsson as Black Panther? They really passed on Damson Idris for some random British guy with zero connection to the culture. Chadwick’s rolling in his grave,” read one post on X. Complaints piled up about British actors “taking American jobs,” and plenty of people argued Marvel should’ve just recast T’Challa outright, because in their view no actor is bigger than the role.
None of this is new. The same fight broke out when Daniel Kaluuya landed Get Out, and it keeps resurfacing whenever a Black British actor picks up a role Americans feel some claim over. Rarely about talent. Mostly about turf.
Underneath it all sits something quieter and sadder — grief that just hasn’t finished running its course. Six years on, some fans still aren’t ready. They don’t want a new Black Panther. They want the one they lost, and no actor anywhere can hand that back to them.
Jonsson is picking up a thread Boseman left behind, not erasing what came before him. But nuance rarely survives a pile-on, and this particular fight probably won’t quiet down until the movie actually opens in December 2028.
The British Pipeline Nobody Wants to Talk About
What a lot of the loudest critics miss: this casting isn’t some fluke. It’s part of something that’s been building for close to a decade.
Kaluuya. Boyega. Wright. Idris. Kingsley Ben-Adir. Now Jonsson. British actors of African and Caribbean descent keep landing the biggest American roles, and the reason isn’t much of a mystery. RADA and LAMDA train actors around stage work — Shakespeare, classical technique, the whole discipline of it. American training tends to lean harder into naturalism, a different muscle entirely.
“British actors have a certain discipline. They come in and they’ve done the work. They’re not worried about looking good. They’re worried about being good.” – a casting director, speaking to Variety
Jonsson’s just the newest name in a pipeline that shows no sign of drying up. The demand for Black talent in these roles is real, and Hollywood, true to form, isn’t especially sentimental about where it finds it.
Did Marvel Just Dodge the Hard Decision?
There’s a fair case that Marvel took the easier road here rather than the honest one.
Six years to recast T’Challa outright, and they didn’t. Instead they killed the character off, let Shuri carry an entire film on her own, then slipped a son into a post-credits scene — someone never hinted at before, never woven into the mythology until that exact moment. Clever storytelling, sure. Also a way of having it both ways: keeping Boseman’s T’Challa untouchable while still putting the suit on somebody new.
Toussaint is, on paper, a different character. Everybody knows that’s mostly a technicality. All the weight the first film spent two hours earning — the father’s death, the doubt, the climb to power — doesn’t just transfer cleanly onto a son the audience has never watched grow up. Jonsson isn’t really inheriting a role. He’s walking through a door Marvel built so it wouldn’t have to make the harder call.
Fans pushing for a straight recast aren’t being unreasonable about it. Keep the story moving, recast and move on. Protect Boseman’s legacy exactly as it was, protect it fully. Splitting the difference the way Marvel has leaves both camps only half satisfied — and maybe that was the point all along.
Coogler hasn’t made a bad film yet. This might be the hardest one to pull off, though — keep the studio happy, honor Boseman, introduce a lead nobody’s met, and still land a billion-dollar hit, all with everyone watching for the first misstep.
Walking Toward a Throne
The Long Walk ends with two boys walking side by side, knowing only one of them survives. It flips King’s original ending into something bleaker, less certain — a story about friendship and the brutal math of who gets to live.
Pete McVries isn’t a king. Just a teenager wearing his legs down in a dystopia he never asked to be in. But the actor who played him is standing under the Hall H lights now, with a franchise worth billions resting on his shoulders. This time he isn’t walking toward death. He’s walking toward a throne.
Boseman won’t be on set when the cameras roll. He’ll still be there, somehow. He probably always will be.
Whether Jonsson can fill the suit was never really the question. The real one is whether he can carry everything sitting underneath the silence.
FAQ About David Jonsson and Black Panther
When does Black Panther 3 come out? December 15, 2028.
Who is David Jonsson? A 32-year-old British actor of Nigerian descent, trained at RADA, known for Industry, Rye Lane, Alien: Romulus, and The Long Walk. He won the BAFTA Rising Star Award in 2025.
Is Chadwick Boseman in the film? No. The film doesn’t recast T’Challa. Jonsson plays Toussaint, the adult son of T’Challa and Nakia.
Why didn’t Marvel just recast T’Challa? Marvel chose to honor Boseman’s legacy instead of replacing him outright, introducing his son as the new Black Panther so the story could keep going without technically erasing the original character.
Who else is in the cast? Ryan Coogler returns as director, with Letitia Wright (Shuri) and Winston Duke (M’Baku) confirmed. Denzel Washington has also joined, reportedly in a role Coogler wrote specifically for him.
Will the film be shot differently? Yes. It’s set to be the first MCU film shot on large-format 70mm celluloid.
What’s the controversy? Part of the fan base wanted a straight recast of T’Challa; others have questioned casting a British actor as an American icon. There’s also been uglier chatter online about Jonsson’s personal life.