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A recent video of Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman posted on Instagram has created quite the stir on social media.
The 42-year-old actor was seeking to celebrate Jackie Robinson Day (he played the iconic figure in the biopic 42) by announcing businessman Thomas Tull’s efforts to provide personal protective equipment worth $4 million dollars to hospitals that service African-American communities. We are all aware that many Black communities around the country have been adversely affected by COVID-19. However, his message ended up taking a backseat to questions about his health. The actor appeared on camera wearing a 42 hat, a nod to Jackie Robinson, looking much skinnier than people are used to.
The confusion was so much so that “Chadwick Boseman” has been trending on Twitter, with people wondering if he’s just slimming down for a role or if something else is going on. Either way, many either expressed their worry, or, looking to make light of everything as usual, told him he needed to eat — a lot.
The actor’s look has actually been transforming for a while now if you’ve paid attention, with early changes happening ahead of the release of Black Panther. He has slowly been getting skinnier, while his hair has grown quite a bit, pretty much all over his head and face. People wondered over the months why he was letting himself get so lean, and there was plenty of conversation around his look at February’s NBA All-Star Game in Chicago (see photo above). The reason for all of this could be Chadwick’s more vegetarian-leaning diet that he picked up while prepping to play T’Challa.
“Yeah, we had a couple of diets. It went through some stages. At first, I was eating a lot of meat, and then I felt like it was too much for the amount of energy we needed to extend every day. So my diet became more vegetarian as we went along,” he told Variety about his preparation for the Marvel hit in 2018. “It’s a lot of eating because there’s a lot of physical activity. The character has to have a lot of agility. It’s like when you see a boxer and he looks like he put on weight, but he actually dropped weight.”
Maybe an affinity for less meat in his diet is behind all this ruckus; that and the fact that when were first introduced to the actor, he was a bit thicker, which some might remember. Hit the flip to see throwback photos of Chadwick and the transformation he’s done, as well as people’s reactions to it:
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Boseman in 2010 while appearing on the show Detroit 1-8-7.
