A ‘Da 5 Bloods’ Actor Has A Heartbreaking Story About Working Alongside Chadwick Boseman

The last Chadwick Boseman movie released before his death was Da 5 Bloods, Spike Lee’s reliably ambitious take on the Vietnam War genre. Boseman played one of the titular “Bloods,” a group of veterans who planted caches of money all over the war-torn country, with plans to retrieve it decades later. But his character, known as “Stormin’ Norm,” is only seen in flashbacks, being the only one to die during the war — a touch that’s gained unintended resonance after his untimely death. It seems Boseman kept his colon cancer a secret from almost the entire industry — to the point that one of his Da 5 Bloods co-stars misjudged his behavior as arrogance, when it certainly was not.

The actor is Clarke Peters, perhaps best known as an alum of both The Wire (as intelligence expert Lester Freamon) and Treme. He played Otis, perhaps the calmest of the quintet, who reunites with his old Vietnamese girlfriend, and the daughter he didn’t know he had. But while making the movie, Peters admitted, on a recent interview with Good Morning Britain (as caught by Entertainment Weekly), he didn’t get along as well with Boseman as he wished he’d had, especially once he learned about his condition. (You can watch the interview below.)

“I have to say with a little bit of regret that I probably wasn’t the most altruistic in that environment, but hindsight teaches us a lot of things,” Peters said on the show. “What I’m addressing is, basically, my wife asked what Chadwick was like. I was really excited to work with him. I said, ‘I think he’s a little bit precious.’ And she said, ‘Why?’ And I said, ‘Because he’s surrounded by people who are fawning over him.’ He has a Chinese practitioner, who is massaging his back when he walks off set. He has a makeup lady massaging his feet. His girlfriend is there holding his hand.

“And I’m thinking maybe the Black Panther thing went to his head.”

It hadn’t. Boseman wasn’t acting princely; he was, Peters and everyone now knows, battling an illness that would soon take his life. “I regret even having those thoughts because they were really looking after him,” Peters said, choking back tears.

It’s a heartbreaking reminder that Boseman kept his illness very close to the chest, right up to the end. There’s still one more Boseman film left to be released: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which Netflix will drop later this year.

(Via EW)