“The World Needs Us”: Ryan Coogler On “Ironheart”, Representation, And Making Space In The MCU

In this series, we have a Black lead, Black directors, Black writers, and Black producers. Can you speak to the joy you feel when you have an all Black team creating a project like this, especially for the MCU…

Angela Barnes: I mean it’s joy, yes, but for me there’s a rest you get. There’s a comfort that’s there of not having to worry about code switching, and I’ll be honest, after 2020, I kind of stopped with code switching in general. But not having to explain why something is culturally important and why it needs to stay in a script, because they know. So for me, yes there was joy, but there was also just that feeling working with my people, and every single last one of them was just killing it; it made me feel really good.

Chinaka Hodge: There was a moment on set where we were shooting in a pool. Dominique – our lead – had to turn over for a different look in a different location, and one of our line producers asked how long we would need. In any other situation, any other room or show I’ve been in, the person would give me too short an amount of time, and I would have to go back and forth with them. I turned to our Head of Hair and she was like, “We need 45 minutes, but I can do it in 25” and I was like correct, that’s the right answer because it takes too long to turn over wet hair into dry hair in a traditional sense, but our people had the know-how and the skill and just trusting them made all the difference in the world. So I share that anecdote because there were so many moments on set where I did not have to explain what was needed, and people both exceeded the expectation, but also made me feel safe in the process. So it was joy. 

Ryan Coogler: The biggest piece about it is my excitement to give it to the audience, because growing up as a fan of comic books, you don’t always feel like comic books are a fan of you, if that makes sense? There’s an anxiety there, and I had an older cousin who was a big comic book head; he’s my first cousin, and he’s Black. I would go into comic book shops with him, because you never knew what kind of looks you were going to get or if folks were going to embrace you. It’s been 30 years since I probably walked into my first comic book shop, and the world has expanded, but there’s still that anxiety where you think, “Is there a place for us here?” and I know there is. The world needs us if it’s going to survive, you know what I mean? It has to grow, it has to expand, it can’t keep serving the same people, the same stories, the same type of stories. 

So for me, the joy is in straight up watching these women work and we had a wide variety of them, from all different ages, different cultures, differest backgrounds, diffreres types of Black women – Black women that are Polish, Black women who’ve been working in the industry, we had it all. It’s a blessing for me to be able to see folks produce with their full selves, and what you get is a show only they could have made. When you work like that, you’re going to find an audience that only that show could find. And because it’s the MCU, which has a built-in audience, it’s going to expand the folks’ minds that are already there, and waiting to see what happens next for Riri Williams. So for that, I felt the most incredible joy.