After a career spent turning supporting turns into center-of-gravity performances—from “Malcolm X” to “Da 5 Bloods” and now “Sinners”—Academy Award-nominated actor Delroy Lindo sounded more than ready to step into a different kind of spotlight. And as his latest run put him back in Ryan Coogler’s orbit, the actor said the two have already talked about a possible return trip to Wakanda.
READ MORE: Delroy Lindo Joins Mahershala Ali In Marvel’s ‘Blade’ Reboot
Fresh off his first Oscar nomination—Best Supporting Actor for his work as Delta Slim, a blues musician, in “Sinners,”—a film that scored a record-setting 16 nominations and turned awards season into a sustained victory lap for Coogler’s latest swing— Lindo shared that he’d told Coogler he was interested if the timing and logistics ever aligned. “I expressed to Ryan that if the stars line up, I would love to be in Black Panther 3,” he said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
It’s also not Lindo’s first brush with Marvel Studios—the actor had previously been attached to “Blade” before exiting the long-delayed reboot. Looking back on the part he was developing, he said the character had “a Marcus Garvey-esque component,” with the role shaped around a leader building and guiding a Black community.
As for “Black Panther 3,” Coogler has been candid that he’s moving forward on the next chapter, including confirming he’s written a role for Denzel Washington. Whether Lindo’s conversation turns into something concrete is, for now, just that—a conversation—but it’s a telling one: even after a decade of IP gravity, Coogler’s corner of Marvel still reads like a place where heavyweight actors imagine they can actually act.
As for Delroy Lindo, if the nomination chatter has tried to box “Sinners” into a “horror breakthrough” narrative for the Academy, he’s pushed back on that label, stressing that there’s much more going on beyond the fangs. “I do not [see it as a horror movie], and I always quote unquote push back,” he told Entertainment Weekly recently. “The vampire aspect is only one of them, albeit a very fundamental and necessary component.”
That kind of framing—genre as a delivery system for bigger ideas—tracks with the wavelength Ryan Coogler has long operated on in “Black Panther,” where spectacle is rarely the point in and of itself, and themes of race, identity, and legacy do the real heavy lifting. Let’s hope this one comes to pass.
The Oscars are set for March 15, and Lindo will head into the ceremony as both a first-time nominee and one of the clearest examples of the Academy finally catching up to an actor audiences have been watching—closely—for a long time.
