During a 2023 interview with The New Yorker, Angela Bassett responded to Anthony Hopkins’ comments regarding the MCU and its lack of space for creative acting. She described her time starring in the “Black Panther” films as an immersive enterprise that fed into her tangible acting. “The throne room was there, the floor of red clay, the elevation with the Dora Milaje flanking around, the grand doors that they walk through,” recalled Bassett. “When Shuri and I went out into the wild, we had trees and bushes and water for yards and yards and yards, and Namor came up out of the water and flew to us … So I had it much better than Anthony Hopkins. I’m sorry for him. We were in Wakanda, and we know Wakanda is special.”
And special it was because Bassett made MCU history with an Oscar nomination for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” She ultimately lost the best supporting actress award to Jamie Lee Curtis for her role in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” but that hardly diminishes her breaking ground with the kind of exceptionalism audiences can expect from the MCU. While Hopkins might consider it pointless to act in a Marvel film, he still puts in the work elsewhere — or at least the Academy believes so. He took home the 2020 best actor Oscar for his role in “The Father,” another film in which he insisted that he wasn’t acting all that much — which begs the question, what does he think acting really is?
