Winston Duke – Super Hero

Just a handful of scenes in 2018's Black Panther made Winston Duke an overnight celebrity. Now he's back with a bigger role in the muchhyped sequel, Wakanda Forever, and unlocking new powers as an artist. But as the cerebral star prepares for a new level of fame, he's mourning the loss of his closest confidante his mother, Mama Coco and searching for deeper meaning in every aspect of his life.

- By Hunter Harris. Photographs by AB+DM

Winston Duke's mother wanted him to be a pastor. In one of our first conversations, he told me she was still holding out hope, imitating her thick Tobagonian accent: "Maybe you'll still become a preacha!" He playacts his loving but firm rebuff: "Lady," he laughs, "give it up!" For a certain kind of mother, and a certain kind of upbringing, a job in the church is the highest calling. That Duke's older sister graduated from high school early and eventually became an accomplished doctor didn't really ease the pressure, either.

Duke, thirty-six, is no man of the cloth. But he has a creation myth to share when I arrive at the Shulamit Nazarian gallery in Los Angeles on a hot, sunny Tuesday afternoon. On display are fifteen works from the artist Trenton Doyle Hancock, who dreams up alter egos, villains, cartoonish Klansmen, and Technicolor creatures, conjuring a world from inspiration that's part autobiography and part fantasy.

There's something in these provocative pieces that captivates Duke. He asks the gallerist to pull a small comic-a primer on Hancock's work-for me to look over. The last time he was here, the gallerist replies, Duke received their final copy. So he says he'll educate me himself, opening a book of the artist's materials: "These," Duke points at two ink-and-paint-drawn figures, "are the father and mother of pretty much everything in his world. The father had an affair with the flowers. He-"

The gallerist jumps in: "He masturbated in a field of flowers."