“Black Panther” surprised everyone by taking home the biggest award of the night at the 2019 Screen Actors Guild Awards on Sunday night.
The mega-hit Marvel superhero film won the prize for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture.
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When the cast, including Letitia Wright, Angela Bassett, Danai Gurira, Lupita Nyong’o, and Michael B. Jordan, took the stage, they left it to star Chadwick Boseman to give the acceptance speech, and he delivered in a big way.
The actor said that doing publicity for the film, the two questions the cast gets asked most often are, “Has it changed this industry?” and, “Has it actually changed the way this industry works, how it sees us?”
Referencing a Nina Simone song, Boseman answered the second question by saying, “To be young, gifted and black.” He then looked over at the film’s lone white main cast member and joked, “And Andy [Serkis], we include you, too.”
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“We all know what it’s like to be told that there is not a place for you to be featured, yet you are young, gifted, and black,” Boseman continued. “We know what it’s like to be told there’s not a screen for you to be featured on, a stage for you to be featured on… And that is what we went to work with every day… We knew not that we would be around during awards season or that it would make a billion dollars but we knew that we had something special that we wanted to give the world.”
