Simone Ledward Boseman is reflecting on the five years that have passed since the death of her husband, actor and writer Chadwick Boseman. “The edges of grief get less sharp over time,” she says. “Five years definitely feels like a marker. I’ve had to gradually figure out how I talk about Chad. What do I want to share, and what do I feel comfortable sharing? Can I find something that I might want to share in the midst of something I don’t want to share?” We meet on a video call across time zones – it’s 9am in California, where she lives. “Except for my mom, I’m not talking to anybody before 10am,” she laughs. She’s made an exception to give a rare interview ahead of the UK premiere of her late husband’s play Deep Azure, which is currently in previews in London at Shakespeare’s Globe.
When Boseman’s death was announced at the end of August 2020, the shock reverberated across the globe. He was devastatingly young – only 43 – and the world was just getting to know him. The release of the movie Black Panther two years earlier, in which he played the eponymous character also known as T’Challa, had skyrocketed his fame. Before then, he had been a successful Hollywood actor. Now? He was a global megastar – the first Black superhero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). The news was doubly shocking because the family had not previously revealed that he had been suffering with colorectal cancer.
Boseman’s diagnosis in 2016 had been a closely guarded secret. “Something like a cancer diagnosis can get in the way of a lot of things,” Ledward Boseman says by way of explanation. The actor worked throughout his treatment, shooting seven movies – including Black Panther – and making countless public appearances. “He never wanted to be treated differently. A lot of the roles he did were so physical, and he still wanted to do them. He did not want to be judged by what he was experiencing. He didn’t want his diagnosis to interfere with the work.”
In the six years they were together, there was a growing interest in Boseman, and by extension, people became interested in Ledward Boseman, too. She acknowledges that curiosity isn’t necessarily fuelled by malicious intent; that sometimes idle chatter can come from genuine concern, “but there’s that danger in any sharing, because one person says something else, then another person says something else, and then it’s on the wind. And the wind is going to carry it wherever it does,” she says. This meant that the couple’s privacy was already a priority. “When you’re in a position like Chad’s, everything you’re doing has to be protected. You just have to be careful who you tell your plans to,” she says. “And if you are someone who only wants to have deep, meaningful relationships and conversations, you very quickly come to find that your circle is going to be small because you can’t have those conversations with very many people.”
When it came to people who knew about Boseman’s health, “it was a couple of family members and a couple of friends. I had my therapist and my mom, and that was basically it. The circle became a dot.”
To the outside world, there were some signs he was unwell, most notably in April 2020 when he appeared on social media to mark Jackie Robinson day during lockdown – Boseman had portrayed the first African American Major League Baseball player in the 2013 biopic 42. He hosted an Instagram Live to announce #Operation42, an initiative to send a $4.2m donation of PPE equipment to hospitals that served the African American communities hit hardest by the Covid-19 pandemic. During the broadcast, comments from fans rolled in expressing concern over his dramatic weight loss. But the speculation was neither confirmed nor denied and soon fizzled out under the cover of the lockdown, which offered a plausible explanation for limited sightings in the final stages of his decline.
* * *
The pair met for the first time at the Hollywood Bowl in August 2014. Ledward Boseman was working at the venue as an events executive, and Boseman was there to perform a duet with D’Angelo for a James Brown tribute concert. The event marked the US release of the biopic Get On Up – in which Boseman stars as Brown – earlier that month. The first time she spoke to him it was to ask about his travel arrangements. “He looked up at me with puppy dog eyes!” she giggles as she talks about their first encounter, though she admits this detail is something they playfully disagreed about. In her version of the story, he struggled to get any words out, managing only an incoherent splutter of sounds. He, on the other hand, was adamant that he was cooler, calmer, more collected.
When Boseman came to soundcheck the following day, Ledward Boseman had done her hair and put on some makeup. “I was making an effort to look a little pretty for him; I felt there was maybe a spark,” she admits. Although she’d seen Boseman act in 42, she was surprised the producers at the venue were treating him as such a big deal, and was expecting a diva to show up. “He was so not that. He was really charming. Huge, huge laugh. Huge smile. And he started flirting with me. He stole my clipboard, took me by the hand and started spinning me into a dance. But he was also very aware, very respectful. He was cautious about not doing too much and also not doing anything when my bosses were around.” She watched the performance from the wings and at the end of the night as they passed each other in the hallway he took her by the hand and said: “Well, I already have your number, but can I call you?” She said yes. Their first date was in the bohemian Los Angeles neighbourhood of Franklin Village: dinner at La Poubelle, followed by a game of pool at the Bourgeois Pig. They continued dating, and two years later, they moved in together – first to a city apartment they both loved but had to leave when a neighbour’s pest control problem became unbearable. Ultimately, they settled in a house in Franklin Village, just around the corner from where they had their first date.
While their romance was not a secret, it was private. But that wasn’t to last. The beginning of their third year together coincided with the release of Captain America: Civil War, where Boseman made his MCU debut as T’Challa. This came with a lot more attention – not all of it positive. On a visit with Boseman to his alma mater, Howard University, Ledward Boseman was warned by a student host that she might have to “defend her Blackness” at an event she was due to attend the following day, as a Black woman of mixed heritage and a lighter skin tone (Ledward Boseman’s mother is African American and her father is Hawaiian-Japanese). “It was shocking, but it wouldn’t have been the first time I had encountered that. I grew up in a space with a lot of multiracial people but I was always made to know by schoolmates that there’s a difference. That I’m Black, but I’m not Black-Black.” After the release of Black Panther she remembers “a lot of voices on the internet” were criticising her because of her heritage. “It was a kind of pitting his real life relationship against his movie relationship [with Lupita Nyong’o],” she says.
* * *
Ledward Boseman was born the youngest of two siblings in Vallejo, a small city in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was raised in a conservative religious community – predominantly by her mother, after her parents divorced when she was three years old, “though they actually have a great relationship for a couple of divorced people”, she’s quick to clarify. She has fond memories of growing up: “As a kid, my mom was a flight attendant, so we did quite a bit of travelling, which is awesome to look back on as an adult. She was flying to London and Germany, and if she ever had a layover that was more than 24 hours then we would just fly with her, which was a lot of fun. It was really special – my mom and I are really close.”
Perhaps it’s because of her religious upbringing that she wasn’t particularly motivated about higher education once she finished school. People from her community were discouraged from pursuing anything that took them away from their ministry: “There’s three meetings a week, and then you’re going door-to-door a couple of times a week. You’re discouraged from making connections and associating with people not of the faith.” Rather than head to a top university like UC Berkeley or UCLA in common with her peers, Ledward Boseman planned on becoming an ultrasound technician. It was a pragmatic decision: “You get paid good money, and you can learn to do it in two years.”
One day, though, she came across a flyer for a music industry studies course at California Polytechnic State University and a childhood dream of becoming a singer was reignited. Performing was out of the question for religious reasons, but she thought it could be a route to a desk job in the music industry. She was already feeling disconnected from her faith, and stopped practising before she moved to Los Angeles to begin her studies. She would live there for 10 years, falling in love with Boseman along the way. She takes a moment to think before she explains her reasons for leaving the organisation. “My mother is still very much devout – I want to be careful about how I talk about this, because I don’t want to offend her,” she says. “The issue I take with most organised religions is the way God is presented as something separate from you. I just don’t subscribe to that. I believe that God, quite literally, is love, which is what Scripture says.”
When Boseman died, there was a great outpouring of love from people all over the world. As his wife, Ledward Boseman felt the weight of the expectation for her to grieve publicly. Was there anger from people who felt they should have been in on the secret? “I’m sure there was,” she sighs. “But I didn’t bear any of that. It’s normal to have questions but I just said, ‘If Chad didn’t talk to you about it, I’m not going to talk to you about it.’” Since his passing, she has fulfilled only a handful of public engagements. The first couple of years saw her accept a slew of awards on Boseman’s behalf – mostly for his performance in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, an adaptation of the August Wilson play that was his final film project. “Those first two years were the most challenging of my life,” she says. “When you lose someone dear to you, two years might as well be two days. The shock of it. The shock of losing that person. For a year I was still waking up, having to remember. And just completely not knowing what to do with myself. The only reason I got out of bed was because I have a dog.” The pair got a giant schnauzer together in May 2020 and named her Sophia; I can hear her protective bark in the background as we speak.
In addition to grieving for her husband, Ledward Boseman had to consider how she would carry him forward in the public sphere. “There was a real swirling of feelings going on and pressures to make decisions about what his legacy would be. How do you know, while you’re still grieving? How do you know what is important to talk about and what’s not important to talk about? I’m figuring out how to step into the role I am in now while dealing with the reality that I don’t have the one person I want to talk to who can help me through all this. Also, I had just turned 30.” (Boseman died a few days before her birthday.) She is speaking slowly, pausing often, her voice occasionally unsteady. “So my response was: I’m not talking to nobody and I’m not doing nothing, which is another lesson I learned from Chad. Two, actually – he taught me that I can’t always be nice. You can always be respectful, but you can’t always be nice. He also taught me that sometimes ‘no’ is a full sentence and sometimes silence is the most eloquent response.”
She has settled on a useful guiding principle – “I don’t have to create his legacy, I just have to protect it,” she says. “I just have to make sure that it doesn’t get flattened. That’s why I love talking about him – I think it’s important that people understand him as a full human being, that they get the full picture of who he was.” The first major opportunity to do this was with the Black Panther sequel, Wakanda Forever, which was released in 2022. The decision was made early on that T’Challa would not be recast and so the script, which the film’s writer and director Ryan Coogler finished just before Boseman’s death, had to be rewritten in a way that not only explained his absence but also honoured the life of his friend. She was in touch with Coogler throughout the process. I ask her about the speech T’Challa’s love interest, Nakia – played by Lupita Nyong’o – makes towards the end of the movie: “He was King and Black Panther to everyone. But to me, he was everything. My T’Challa.” It’s poignant, as if Ledward Boseman herself is addressing the world – did she know that was in there? “Ryan did specifically ask me about that scene. The only thing I added to it was that she said his name.”
In March 2023, Ledward Boseman accepted an invitation to the White House where she gave a speech advocating for those affected by colorectal cancer. Talking about Boseman in cancer-specific spaces is something she continues to be cautious about: “I never want his life story to be distilled down to the way that he died. I want his life to be about the way that he lived.” She’s slowly becoming more vocal about the disadvantages faced by Black communities when it comes to knowledge and resources to combat the disease. “Chad’s case was not unique, and I was shocked to find out that information. Livid.” Connecting with individuals who understand the experience was healing; she also came to understand that her presence was healing for other people. “I wanted to approach this group not as the partner of a famous person, but as a widow who had lost her husband to colorectal cancer. I felt for the first time part of this community.”
* * *
THIS WEEK, one of Boseman’s plays, Deep Azure, is being revived for a nine-week run at Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in London. It will be the biggest professional production of the piece since Boseman himself first staged it more than 20 years ago. The play tells the story of the aftermath of the death of an unarmed Black man, Deep, who is murdered by a police officer. It mirrors a real life situation Boseman experienced while studying at Howard University. His friend, fellow student Prince Jones, was murdered by a Black police officer in September 2000. “It’s about what’s happening to the characters and how they’re dealing with their grief both individually and collectively,” says director Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu. “Survival is demanded of us, but how do we get there?” There is something poetic about staging Boseman’s play about grieving a prominent Black man in the wake of an untimely death in this moment.
Deep Azure is not an immediately obvious choice for Shakespeare’s Globe. London-based Fynn-Aiduenu discovered the script in an anthology of plays, while researching hip-hop theatre in early 2020. Fynn-Aiduenu also found out that Boseman had strong links not only to the UK theatre scene, but also to Shakespeare specifically. He studied the Bard at Balliol College, Oxford, with the British American Drama Academy – paid for by Denzel Washington – an opportunity facilitated by the actor Phylicia Rashad, who was a teacher and mentor to Boseman during his time at Howard.
“I want audiences to celebrate and be inspired by the multifaceted life of Chadwick Boseman, which includes his playwriting,” says the director. “I want to create a safe space in which to explore Black communal grief.”
Ledward Boseman didn’t read the play until after Boseman’s death. It has only ever been professionally performed once – in a 2005 production by Congo Square Theatre Company in Chicago. “I think, like most artists, sometimes it can be hard to share things that are from so long ago because it doesn’t always feel like they still represent who you are now as an artist. And then after he passed, it was really difficult to read the play. To see him. In the end, it was incredibly healing for me, but I had to take it in very small steps.” She has had some involvement in the London production – mostly approving edits to help contextualise the play for a British audience, but is yet to get to the end of the script – both because “it was just challenging to read and also because I still want to be surprised”. In their relationship, Boseman routinely kept the details of his projects under wraps while he was working on them so that she could experience the work as an audience member. Not reading all of the play is her way of continuing to honour that tradition.
She remembers 2018 as the couple’s best year together. Black Panther had made $1.3bn on its initial release, breaking numerous box office records. It was the most successful launch for a non-sequel superhero film. “They were opening up theatres in countries where movies had been banned for 20 years just so people could watch this movie. He had worked so hard to make it what it was. And it was this full circle moment in his life where he got to use so much knowledge that he had been gathering over the last two decades in this film. A beautiful, beautiful moment,” she says.
But the main reason Ledward Boseman thinks so fondly of that year is that for the majority of it, Boseman was cancer-free. Getting through the two years following the initial diagnosis really galvanised their relationship. “We had to lean on each other so heavily, and we got so close. And, oh my God – he was just so beautiful! He’d been doing all those Black Panther workouts and he was just, so fine!” She elongates the vowel sounds in the word, as if the one syllable does not adequately convey the level of attractiveness she is trying to describe.
Remission gave Boseman a renewed zest for life: “Imagine you’re ready to live a hundred times beyond what you’ve already been doing. Our appreciation for each other, his appreciation for his own time – it was just a really, really beautiful year. We were travelling, seeing the world, and we were so in love.” At the end of that year, the cancer had not only returned, but progressed, and the couple found themselves teetering between pragmatism and faith. “To acknowledge what might happen almost felt like a betrayal of that faith. So there wasn’t any talk around him not making it.”
If Ledward Boseman has any regrets, this is one of them. “Sometimes I wish we had been able to talk about those things, so that he could even start to dream about it – and look at death with less fear. I would have liked to be more comfortable asking him what he wanted. Not just for himself, but for me, for his family. When we did talk about it, he told me it made him happy to know we were going to be OK.”
The two of them first started talking about marriage in the aftermath of the diagnosis in 2016, “when it was early and we weren’t scared of it. It was all full steam ahead, but then he started to express some concerns about the ‘what ifs’. They’re such hard conversations to have – but I had to explain that it wasn’t going to hurt less if we weren’t married.” They finally got engaged in the autumn of 2019, after which Boseman’s health quickly took a turn for the worse. There was no doubt that one of the things he wanted to do in the time he had left was get married. When describing their wedding, the first thing Ledward Boseman thinks to say is that it was a hard day. There’s a long silence before she continues, “We found a way to celebrate in the midst of all this sadness, and hopelessness, and grief.” The gathering was small: her sister helped her get ready; her parents walked her down the aisle.
It would be wrong to assume Ledward Boseman now has little time for anything but serving her husband’s legacy. She is clear that’s not the case: “He would be upset if I made my life about his life.” She recently moved from Los Angeles back to Vallejo to be closer to family. She’s deep in the planning stages of her first business venture – a neighbourhood wine bar in her home city. She’s also been working on her music career as a singer under her artist name, sahn, performing around the US – including at the Apollo Music Café in New York. Her second album, the garden, will be released in May this year.
“From the point I met Chad, it’s been hard to talk about myself and my work without talking about him. He just changed my whole life and my perspective of my life – he was my most important spiritual teacher. My mother laid the foundation for my spirituality and my artistic practice, but Chad expanded that view astronomically.”
And she loves talking about Boseman, because she says to talk about him is to remember him. “I love knowing that he lived and his spirit still does. I love being able to commune with him in the spirit now, which is the hardest thing about grief – trying to rebuild a connection you once had in the physical that you now only have in the spiritual. There’s this poem that I read very early on that speaks about continuing to say their name –” She stops to do an internet search for the poem, Death is Nothing at All by Henry Scott Holland, and then reads: “Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference in your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.”
• Deep Azure runs until 11 April at the Globe theatre’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, shakespearesglobe.com
