When Danai Gurira was around 9 or 10, a classmate two years her senior punched her in the stomach. “I’m just out talking and totally outsmarting him, probably being a little snarky, but whatever,” she tells me over a recent Zoom call. “And then, he…” She takes a pause. “He punched me. He punched me. Like four times in the stomach. Boom boom boom boom.”
After it happened, Gurira went into a state of shock. “I just had not experienced violence,” she says. “I just hadn’t. My dad never spanked me. I just didn’t know what this was.” Gurira wasn’t much of a crier as a child. (“I was a tough kid. I was a jock,” she qualifies.) But in the immediate aftermath of her classmate’s violent outburst, she couldn’t help but break down in tears. Unsure of how to respond, she eventually went to the principal, a white Zimbabwean woman, and said, “Look at what just happened to me.”
Perhaps subconsciously, Gurira put a lot of stock into the principal’s next move. “Depending on what she was going to do, it was going to define how I felt I could push my way through the world as a woman when she deals with injustice—when she deals with whatever—or when she wants to put her voice out there,” she continues. “It was going to be very definitive.”
So when the principal disciplined the student, Gurira felt strangely empowered. To Gurira the school principal represented powerful women; seeing that power be wielded to stand up for what’s right was revelatory. “It did something to me,” she says. She remembers seeing her classmate leave the principal’s office crying, much as she had been made to do by him shortly before. “I feel like there was something very powerful in it for me, as a girl, to know that it’s not okay for someone to lay their hands on you like that, and someone would stand up for me, so I would want to stand up for others,” she says. “Some sense of justice came from that moment, and a passion around women and girls and our protections and our rights.”
Gurira recalls this story to me while reflecting on a book she had been reading, Rich Villodas’s The Deeply Formed Life, which inspired her to revisit her “formative years,” as she says, in order to better understand the decisions she makes in the present. The anecdote is initially prompted by a question about her interest in telling stories centered around Black women, but in talking, she also notes how this same experience might speak to the roles she’s best known for today.
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Gurira has been nabbing screen credits for close to two decades now, first appearing in a 2004 episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent. (“Everyone does a little Law & Order in New York City,” she jokes about her very first IMDB credit.) Throughout her career, Gurira also had one foot firmly planted in the theater world, both as an actor and as an award-winning playwright.
Bodysuit and helmet by PH5. Sneakers Giuseppe Zanotti. Ring Joanna Laura Constantine.
Bodysuit and helmet by PH5. Sneakers Giuseppe Zanotti. Ring Joanna Laura Constantine.
These projects, along with her work in David Simon’s post-Katrina New Orleans saga Treme, would bring Gurira some manner of acclaim. But it wasn’t until 2012, when she made her debut as the ruthless katana-wielding Michonne in AMC’s zombie drama The Walking Dead, that Gurira really came to national prominence. That character, which exited The Walking Dead in 2020 but will return in a new six-episode spinoff set for next year, quickly became a fan favorite; Gurira, in turn, became a bona fide star. In fact, amongst Gurira’s oeuvre, Michonne is probably second in popularity only to General Okoye, the fierce leader of the Dora Milaje, an all-women army dedicated to protecting the fictional African kingdom of Wakanda. Okoye first appeared on screen in Disney’s blockbuster Marvel entry Black Panther. Since then, Gurira has reprised the role in Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame, and of course, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which will hit theaters on November 11, 2022.
Source: SELF
