Ferrously ferocious

In Ironheart, Dominique Thorne suits up for the spotlight

- SARAH BAHR

It isn’t a hard question: Where do you live?

But Dominique Thorne, the 27-year-old star of Marvel's new Ironheart miniseries, needed a moment to answer because, well, honestly, she wasn’t sure.

She had just gotten back from two weeks in Japan. Before that, she spent seven months in Thailand, where she “ate my way across the country” (“As a pescatarian, it was like a dream come true,” she said.)

And now she was about to embark on a press tour to promote the six-part Ironheart, premiering this week on Disney+ Hotstar, in which she reprises the role of Riri Williams, the brilliant young inventor from the 2022 movie Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

That tour will take her from New York, where she was born, to Los Angeles, where she holed up for a few months during the pandemic, to Atlanta, where parts of the show were filmed and where her parents and two younger brothers live.

“I’m at the point where I’m thinking now about where I want to settle down,’ she said on a Monday afternoon last month, her big brown eyes sparkling as she settled in to a velour couch in the lobby of the Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan. (For now, her mailing address is in New York.)

She pulled an oversize Malcolm X sweatshirt over a sleeveless white top and green cargo pants. Her purple ombré nails glinted in the sunlight streaming in from the adjoining solarium as she reached for a cup of tea.

“I'm always cold,’ she said as she dipped a tea bag into her mug in the over-air-conditioned lobby bar.

At 155cm and with hoodie sleeves that swallowed up her hands, Thorne could have easily passed for 10 years younger. She nearly does in Ironheart, which begins with Riri still enrolled as astudent at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she began at 15. Riri is attempting to refine a high-tech suit of armour that would rival that of Tony Stark, also known as Iron Man. Unfortunately, her fundraising methods are questionable.