Ryan Coogler’s name has become synonymous with superheroes; as the director and co-writer of Marvel’s Black Panther and the upcoming Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, he’s well known as one of the most successful new Hollywood names in a generation. What is less well known is that Coogler doesn’t just direct smash-hit superhero movies, he also displays several superheroic traits of his own, from his backstory and athleticism to his philanthropy and activism. Who better to write and direct superhero movies than a True Superhero!
Ryan with Black Panther star Danai Gurira
The young competitor
Ryan was born in 1986 and raised in Richmond, California. His mother was a community organizer, while his father was a probation counsellor, and he was lucky to have a more stable home life than many of his neighbors, as Ryan told Andscape in 2018: “Where we were living there were housing projects right behind us. I would play with those kids, but I would get teased because I went to a nicer school. I had both parents in the house. So, I didn’t really fit in.”
Returning to his old stomping ground at Sac State in 2013
This meant a lot of fights with older kids for young Ryan, but he soon found a more productive way of competing. He was fast, both on the track and on the football field, and this led to scholarships and eventually a successful college career as a wide receiver, but Ryan feared that he was too short to make it in the NFL. He had more realistic ambitions of becoming a doctor, until a chance encounter would set him on a different path.
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Ryan Coogler’s name has become synonymous with superheroes; as the director and co-writer of Marvel’s Black Panther and the upcoming Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, he’s well known as one of the most successful new Hollywood names in a generation. What is less well known is that Coogler doesn’t just direct smash-hit superhero movies, he also displays several superheroic traits of his own, from his backstory and athleticism to his philanthropy and activism. Who better to write and direct superhero movies than a True Superhero!
Ryan with Black Panther star Danai Gurira
The young competitor
Ryan was born in 1986 and raised in Richmond, California. His mother was a community organizer, while his father was a probation counsellor, and he was lucky to have a more stable home life than many of his neighbors, as Ryan told Andscape in 2018: “Where we were living there were housing projects right behind us. I would play with those kids, but I would get teased because I went to a nicer school. I had both parents in the house. So, I didn’t really fit in.”
Returning to his old stomping ground at Sac State in 2013
This meant a lot of fights with older kids for young Ryan, but he soon found a more productive way of competing. He was fast, both on the track and on the football field, and this led to scholarships and eventually a successful college career as a wide receiver, but Ryan feared that he was too short to make it in the NFL. He had more realistic ambitions of becoming a doctor, until a chance encounter would set him on a different path.
While at college Ryan was required to take a creative writing course. The assignment was to write about a personal experience, and Ryan chose an incident so personal to him that - with the typical reticence of a Superhero - he’s only ever discussed it once (in an early interview with Filmmaker Magazine in 2012) concerning a time when his father “almost bled to death in his arms”. The tutor read the piece and then asked him what he wanted to do with his life, to which Coogler replied: “Play ball, become a doctor and be a positive influence in my community.”His tutor replied: “I think you should become a screenwriter. You can reach more people.” This was extremely good advice and Coogler enthusiastically took it. Before long, he was studying film and producing his own short movies.
Forest and Fruitvale
Ryan’s earliest work demonstrated both his skill as a filmmaker, and his commitment to his subjects and the issues that affect them. Coogler said of one of his earliest films about a sex worker trying to leave her old life behind, 2011’s Fig: “That film is from deep research. I spent Christmas break on the streets and got a lot of stories. I never want to shy away from the truth.”
Ryan on the set of Fruitvale Station with actor Michael B. Jordan
That skill and spirit were enough to persuade Forest Whitaker to sign on as producer for Ryan’s first full length feature, 2013’s Fruitvale Station, a dramatization of the last 24 hours of Oscar Grant, an unarmed African-American man shot dead by police in 2009. Ryan saw many similarities between himself and Grant: “We were the same age, from the same place - the East Bay. His friends looked like my friends… I've been in situations where you get stopped by police - it's not something unfamiliar.” Fruitvale Station was a huge critical success, winning awards at Sundance and Cannes, and it also cleaned up at the box office; the film cost less than $1m to make, and would go on to gross over $17m.
From Oakland To Hollywood
That sort of success gets you noticed and Coogler had a much bigger budget for his next project, but it was still something deeply personal to him. The inspiration for his 2015 Rocky spin-off movie Creed came from his father, Ira, who had a personal connection of his own with the Rocky movies; as a young man, he watched them with Ryan’s grandmother as she fought a decade-long battle with breast cancer. As Ryan later said: “The first time I saw my dad cry was probably watching a Rocky movie… Before I knew what a good movie was, what a bad movie was, I knew that this particular film had a profound effect on my father. ”
Ryan with Creed actors Sylvester Stallone and Michael B. Jordan
In 2011, before Ryan found success with Fruitvale Station, Ira was stricken by a mysterious neuromuscular illness, and this led to the idea for Creed, in which another father figure (Rocky Balboa) is diagnosed with cancer and struggles to fight off the disease while also training his old rival Apollo Creed’s son. We won’t spoil how Creed ends, but the real life story ended happily, with Ira being successfully diagnosed and treated just in time for the release of his son’s next critically acclaimed box-office smash.
Like father, like son
Ira’s influence didn’t end with filmmaking, however. Ryan also sought to emulate another part of his father’s life - his work as a probation officer. Despite his enormous success as a screenwriter and director, Ryan has found the time to give back to his community, working as a youth guidance counsellor in the same juvenile detention halls where his father was a probation officer. He explained his role to Buzzfeed: "We're the people that have close contact with the kids… We're not psychiatrists or psychologists, they have those… We're there to talk to them. We're there for support. We're basically the adult presence in their lives. And we also have to keep them safe."
From Hollywood To Wakanda
The following year, he signed up with Marvel to write and direct Black Panther, which was not just the highest-grossing movie ever made by an African-American but also became the fifth-highest grossing film of all time as well as the best-reviewed Marvel movie with a 96% positive score on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes. Cooger is also working on the sequel, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and his production company has also signed on to produce a forthcoming Wakanda series for Disney+. Meanwhile, Ryan’s vital work as a campaigner and activist has continued with his Blackout For Human Rights organization fighting to address human rights violations in the US. Sadly, an incident has highlighted just how necessary this work is, as Ryan was briefly arrested in 2022 outside an Atlanta bank where the teller interpreted his request to make a legitimate cash withdrawal as a robbery attempt, and phoned the police.
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