Daniel Kaluuya Confirmed He Isn't In Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Daniel Kaluuya has confirmed he won't be in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

Kaluuya, 33, told Entertainment Tonight that he won't be reprising the role of W'Kabi, the best friend and confidant to Chadwick Boseman's T'Challa, in the sequel to the 2018 movie because he was tied up with filming the UFO thriller Nope.

"I'm not in it," the Oscar-winning actor clarified. "I was filming Nope. ... I was always in prep and then the call came, and I wasn't able to do it."

Kaluuya, who won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for 2021's Judas and the Black Messiah, insisted there are no hard feelings between him and Marvel and he "can't wait" to see the finished movie because he knows it will pay tribute to Boseman — who died following a secret battle with cancer in August 2020 — in an "incredible" way.

He added: "It's love, man, but also, I've heard things and I know that they're gonna do Chad an incredible, incredible, incredible service, so that's what I really care about. I can't wait to watch it."

The other original movie cast members confirmed to return to the Ryan Coogler-helmed follow-up are  Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira, Martin Freeman, Letitia Wright, Winston Duke, and Angela Bassett. I May Destroy You's Michaela Coel and Judas and the Black Messiah's Dominique Thorne are reportedly in the movie as well.

Kaluuya can next be seen in Jordan Peele's Nope, which opens in the US next week, and in Singapore in August.  He previously worked on Peele's directorial debut, 2017's Get Out, which earned Kaluuya a Best Actor nod, and won Peele Best Original Screenplay at the Oscars. 

In the new issue of Empire, Peele said he once likened his working relationship with Kaluuya to that of Martin and Scorsese and Robert De Niro.

"It's so funny," Peel said. "But by the point, I was in the middle of [shooting] Get Out, that's when I was telling him. I was like [makes serious eye contact], 'You're my De Niro, man. You're my De Niro." He added, "I was like, 'I need you to be in the future ones, too, man!' You could just tell what we had in him as a performer, from the very beginning."

Is Kaluuya really not in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever? We've been here before with Andrew Garfield and John Krasinski — they denied being in Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, respectively, which turned out to be not true. 

We'll know for sure when Panther: Wakanda Forever hits the big screen on Nov 11. Nope opens in Singapore cinemas on Aug 18. 

Photo: TPG News/Click Photos