Winston Duke has become a popular actor since he first appeared as M'baku in Black Panther. He reprised that role in Wakanda Forever, but didn't realize that along the way, he'd become a heroic figure of another kind.
In an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Wednesday, the muscular 6'5 actor found out that he'd become an inspiration to a group he never expected.
"So much has changed after doing the Rihanna Fenty show and having myself [on the Esquire] cover, something happened that I didn't expect," Duke said. He appears on the cover of the winter issue of Esquire magazine, released in November.
"So all these big guys on Twitter have now crowned me the face of the plus-sized movement. I woke up one morning and I was plus-size. I had no idea. I became the face of the plus-size movement."
However, Duke says a horse on a recent trip to Mexico had little respect for his new honor.
"I went for a horseback ride, like a little trail thing. And this horse had no idea I was the face of the plus-size movement. This horse was trying to play me, man," he told Fallon.
This horse didn't want me on his back, this horse was throwing tantrums. It was like [mimics horse sounds] it looked back at me, exasperated, and the guy's like no, just kick him, he's like, lazy. We got to a mild incline, a mild incline, and the horse stopped, looked at me, looked back at the incline, and decided it was not going to go."
Duke says the horse was the slowest in his riding group, but sped up once they made it back to where they'd started.
"I got off the horse, it stopped, turned around, and looked at me like 'You should have known better.' This horse has no respect for the thick thigh nation."
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Duke has had better luck as an integral part of the Black Panther franchise. Wakanda Forever, the sequel to the first film starring the late Chadwick Boseman as King T'Challa, grossed over $800 million worldwide and is on track to be in the top ten of the highest-grossing films of 2022. Duke announced on The Tonight Show that it was the highest-grossing film led by female superheroes in the country.
He told Fallon that was is most significant aside from the film's worldwide success is the opportunity it gave both fans and the cast to grieve Boseman, who died in 2020 at the age of 41 after a private battle with colon cancer.
"It became this opportunity for us all to come to grips with the grief that we've all been feeling, and it became this opportunity to say goodbye to Chadwick and to give ourselves permission to grieve," he said. "The movie is about grief. The movie is about there's no such thing as the right time.
"There's no such thing as the right way to grieve. And the only way to do it is to get through it. And people really got a chance to do that with the film," he added.
As for the future of his character, Duke hopes that he will be able to play M'baku, who leads the Jabari, not just in other Black Panther movies, but in a film centered around him.
"I'd love to see a spin-off for M'Baku," Duke told Esquire. "I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The Jabari culture is grounded in the rich Igbo culture of Southern Nigeria."
Duke concluded, "If we get a spin-off and we get to learn what things mean... dive into that culture, it would be something really special."