It's no wonder Chadwick Boseman is looking more "Wakanda Whatever" than "Wakanda Forever" lately. The Black Panther star says strangers have followed him in order to do the instantly famous salute with him.
"They see me coming," the T'Challa actor said on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, "so like whereas before you might recognize me 10 feet away, now it's like you're all the way down the street and they're like, 'That's him, I know it's him!' And they're chasing you. Or you're even driving in your car and people are chasing you if they notice you. People have followed me just to do—" he said before holding up the Wakanda salute.
With that level of frequency, it's no wonder Boseman isn't doing the salute at full throttle each time. During the Avengers: Infinity War premiere, two months after Black Panther hit theaters, Boseman was photographed doing a lackluster salute which led to a series of "Wakanda Whatever" memes.
"I thought that was funny," he said of the critique. "Cause it's a salute, you know. If I was in the military and I did this every day, I'm not gonna do it the same every time. Sometimes it's more pedestrian. So that person, whoever I was doing it to at that moment caught a casual one. But three minutes before that I probably did one that was like, fully."
Boseman also gave some insight on how the salute came together in the first place. "We were doing the scene in the throne room and Ryan [Coogler] came up to me. and was basically like, 'We need some way for the Dora Milaje, his guard, to sort of salute you,'" Boseman recalled. "And so we had been talking about these sort of poses, that have ancient meanings. So this was sort of like an Egyptian Pharoah."
But most importantly, Boseman is still Wakanda Forever, definitely not Wakanda Never.
