Entertainment News | TV & Film
Michaela Ewuraba Boakye-Collinson, known professionally as Michaela Coel, has been cast as Aneka in the upcoming Marvel movie “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”.
To those with taste, Coel’s name isn’t new. She created, produced, wrote and starred in in “Chewing Gum” and the Emmy-nominated limited series “I May Destroy You”, in which she was the first back woman to win the Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series, Movie, or Dramatic Special.
Although the details of what her character will be doing in the movie are still sealed tight, as is normal with Marvel movies, Aneka in the Marvel comics is the combat trainer of the Dora Milaje, tasked by T’Challa, who will of course be absent in this movie, to train the female warriors in combat techniques.
Aneka is canonically queer in the series, which could make this inclusion of the character a huge step in the right direction for the Marvel cinematic universe, which has previously stuck with allusions to or quippy one-liners as their representation of the LGBTQ community. The character Aneka is romantically linked to a fellow Dora Milaje warrior, Ayo, who appeared in the previous Black Panther, portrayed by Florence Kasumba.
Coel has yet to officially make a statement on her casting, but she did tweet a trailer featuring her character Aneka in a seemingly fighting stance, holding a dagger. This doesn’t give any reference to if the character will be true to the source material of being a combat instructor, or simply be another member of the Dora Milaje.
The plot for the upcoming sequel to Marvel's smash hit “Black Panther” see’s Wakanda mourning T’Challa, fittingly as Chadwick Boseman tragically passed in 2020, and striving to protect their people from a new threat, the King of Atlantis.
You can watch the trailer for Wakanda Forever in Coel's tweet below: