Happy Belated Birthday, Danai Gurira: Fem Film Rogue Icon Spotlight

 

Happy belated birthday, Danai Gurira.

Born on Valentine’s Day, our favorite sweetheart Danai Gurira is an incredible double threat—an award winning actress and a Tony and Pulitzer Prize nominated playwright. For years, she turned our heads as the courageous, machete wielding Michonne on The Walking Dead, played the torn immigrant Adenike making heavy decisions in Mother of George, and kicked butt as Okoye, the head of the Dora Milaje in the Black Panther, Avengers: The Infinity War, and Avengers: Endgame. 

In Andrew Dosunmu’s Mother of George, newlywed Adenike (Danai Gurira) must keep her Yoruba family tradition alive in her new American life. DP Bradford Young. 

Born in Grinnell, Iowa to Zimbabwean parents (Josephine, a college librarian and Roger, a tenured professor at Grinnell College), Danai Jesekai Gurira was the youngest of four children . Her family returned to Zimbabwe in 1983, a few years after its gained independence from British rule. She then attended Dominican Convent High School and returned to the United States; pursuing higher education at Macalester in St. Paul, Minnesota (earning a psychology BFA) and Tisch School for the Arts at New York University (earning an MFA in acting). At Macalester, she performed the late great ntozake shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuff. While at NYU, she tried recruiting Lupita Nyong’o (who chose Yale instead) and they have been close friends ever since. Gurira also taught playwright and acting in Liberia, South Africa, and home country, Zimbabwe. 

Danai Gurira and Lupita Nyong’o have a beautiful, Black sistah girl friendship that has them traveling the world together, showing up at premieres and red carpets holding hands, and professional partnerships— co-starring in Ryan Coogler’s successful Black Panther and Nyong’o starring in Gurira’s play, Eclipsed. 

Gurira’s poignant, must-see plays are extraordinarily written; all taking considerable care to point out the role of Christianity’s dominance over the spiritual nature of Rhodesia (later turned Zimbabwe). For In the Continuum—which she both wrote and starred in— Gurira won a special citation from Obie, the Helen Hayes Award, and the Outer Critics Circle Award. The Convert tenderly showcases a young woman’s devotion to her ancestral heritage despite others desperately wanting her allegiance to new religion. It won the Whiting and Los Angeles Drama Circle Critics Award. Eclipsed is a heartbreaking drama centering the trials and tribulations of abused women during war and co-starring Nyong’o. It was the first all female cast/crew production ever on Broadway. Eclipsed was nominated for Best Play at the Tony Awards; winning Lilly, Drama Desk Awards, and ImageNation Revolution Awards. Gurira also put on a Shakespeare in the Park performance and was commissioned by Yale Preparatory Theatre for her last play Familiar. 

Michonne (Danai Gurira) lasted for eight seasons on The Walking Dead.

The funny quipping, resourceful fighting Okoye (Danai Gurira) was a real scene stealer in the Black Panther. DP Rachel Morrison.

In the acting realm, Gurira is widely known for portraying Black heroines from comic book adaptations— The Walking Dead and Black Panther. Originally, Michonne entered as a vessel withholding emotions, having lost so much to the undead disease. Grief transformed her into that machete soldier. Until, she met Rick and opened up a softer, gentler side, letting her guard down among the monsters that constantly surrounded them. Gurira won two Saturns, an honorary merit CinEuphoria, and Gracie Award for her portrayal. Black Panther’s Okoye is similar, her passion for her king and country driving her stout heart. She loves her Dora Milaje women including Nakia who is not of the army, but of Wakanda. Gurira won another Saturn, an Image Award, People’s Choice, and SAG Award for her amazing performance. Mother of George reveals Gurira’s potential to be in other roles— another stirring drama or perhaps a romantic comedy or a grisly horror— with her as the lead. Although Gurira admits that horror is not her favorite, she held her own in a gruesome zombie apocalypse. Maybe she could star in Nikyatu Jusu’s upcoming project with Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions. African womanhood/blackness is a courageous theme in Gurira’s plays. Imagining her starring in a cinematic story told by another Black woman would be struck gold. 

Danai Gurira in Los Angeles Times photographed by Christopher L. Procter, 2019. 

Still, a shame that Gurira and Nyong’o’s adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah did not pan out over at Amazon Studios. With Gurira on writing duty and Nyong’o starring as Ifemulu, that would have been an incredibly executed miniseries. 

Currently, Danai Gurira is filming the sequel Wakanda Forever sadly without its star the late Chadwick Bozeman. In addition to reteaming with bestie Lupita Nyong’o and filmmaker Ryan Coogler, Gurira has recently announced that she will be starring as Shirley Chisholm in a biopic fueled Hollywood. She will be amazing either way, having shown impeccable acting chops across genres. There is hope that while she continues to write multifaceted stories from the African woman perspective in play medium (with maybe tv/film in the future), that Gurira continues building a successful career as an actress too. She is most certainly very talented at both.  

Danai Gurira on Oscar night. 

Danai Gurira quotes:

“As a kid, that’s when you figure out how you envision yourself. You see yourself as Other as a child because you don’t have the vocabulary nor the worldview or the understanding of global history and all the dynamics of racial oppression to understand that it’s not as it should be. So as a child, you’re really being indoctrinated with the idea that you’re not it. You’re not of the right thing, and these are the people who are. And that’s what’s really scary about not giving children representation. They absorb those images. But it’s so unnecessary. We don’t actually have to put children through that. It’s really easy to give them representations of self, whatever color they are.”

“It happened for the first time when I was nine in Zimbabwe where I was raised... when it happened, I remember being surprised by it. I never thought about it. But when I did receive that compliment, a stunning brown-skinned woman took my face in her hands, her long flowing braids casting down her back. I realized it was something I would always cherish. She looked at me, observing me with deep appreciation... and told me that I was beautiful. She said it with such feeling that it filtered straight into my soul and left an indelible imprint.... So I had to consider the idea that it may just be true.”

“I love writing for actors; women of African descent and people who generally are underrepresented.”

“In terms of writing, I just wasn't finding enough stories about contemporary African people - or historical, just anything, the whole gamut. I was raised in southern Africa and I came back to the West for college. I was starting to look for what I would like to perform, what I would like to see put to life onstage, and I was finding many stories about everybody else, but none about my own people. My playwriting became a "necessity being the mother of invention" type thing. I wasn't finding what I wanted to perform, so I started to create it myself.”