Everything Has a Story in Wakanda Forever

Everything Has a Story in Wakanda Forever,Production designer Hannah Beachler breaks down Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’s most meaningful new sets, from Talokan and Namor’s throne to Chadwick Boseman’s mural and Wakanda’s Golden City.

Everything Has a Story in Wakanda Forever

To build the world of 2018’s Black Panther, production designer Hannah Beachler spent 18 months putting together a planning document commonly referred to in the industry as a bible. Not everyone’s is 550 pages, though, nor does it help them win an Academy Award. For the sequel, Wakanda Forever, Beachler’s work doubled. She had to both expand on the locations of the first film and craft a second whole new world: the underwater realm of Talokan, led by the anti-hero K’uk’ulkan/Namor (Tenoch Huerta). It’s a confidently specific visual feast, one dense with references to Yucatec Mayan culture, influenced by what Beachler describes as director Ryan Coogler’s “hard sci-fi” preferences, and populated by the oceanic flora and fauna beside which the Talokanil live (including a 15-foot orca made out of fiberglass). The sets were designed and constructed to emphasize practical effects, like the movie’s use of underwater filming. Here, Beachler breaks down four key locations. And, yes, her bible was once again a mammoth.

The Mural

Chadwick Boseman, who played the titular Black Panther, died in August 2020. A large mural of King T’Challa now overlooks the heart of his kingdom. The Wakandan text — which Beachler created for the first film by adapting and evolving the ancient Nigerian language of Nsibidi — alongside Boseman’s portrait memorializes him and his character as enduring “forever in us.”

Photo: Marvel Studios/Walt Disney Pictures

Then we really went in and started to detail that. On the side this jade tooth bites is carved in Talokanil. It’s one hieroglyph, and it’s all over that beautiful, 15-by-10-foot wide jaw. Each tooth was 3-D printed and then it was painted to look like jade. We could not have our Namor come into just a blue environment. Not on this grand, beautiful scale. Our set decorator, Lisa K. Sessions, brought in Spondylus shells, which were red and very rare and for which you had to pe up to 50 feet. They were usually only something noblemen or people of more status would have.

When they first did Namor descending to his throne, I was like, “Oh my God, it looks like Jaws. It’s fantastic!” It was ginormous and very detailed. There’s a story in the hieroglyphs behind him, on the higher cliffs, and all over. Nobody knows this but the ones on the front of the doors are about Ryan and his daughter; it has the sun and the moon on it for them.

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The warrior shaman who became the first Black Panther and Wakandan king.Figures who represent complementary concepts like life and death and the Sun and the Moon.