Wakanda Forever

Project Context

Wakanda Forever introduced Talokan — a Mesoamerican underwater civilization living 12,000 feet below the Atlantic Ocean. The film’s Production Designer, Hannah Beachler, was the first and only Black female Production Designer Marvel had ever hired. Her mandate was clear: Talokan had to be built on real history, real architecture, and real cultural research. It could not be another invented Atlantis.

I was one of three Black set designers on a team of 35. My job was to take Hannah’s vision and the academic research behind it and turn it into something a construction crew could actually build — drawings, models, specifications, details — while making sure nothing culturally important got lost in translation.

What Was at Stake

Talokan is a Mesoamerican civilization. That means its visual language — its symbols, its proportions, its materials, its spatial logic — had to come from actual Mayan architectural and cultural research, not from imagination or generic ‘ancient civilization’ shorthand.

If any of that slipped — if a glyph was wrong, a proportion was off, a structural form was borrowed from the wrong culture — it would register to Mesoamerican communities watching the film as carelessness. Or worse, as the same erasure that Hollywood has always committed against non-Western cultures.

Hannah had fought to get this right. My job was to make sure it stayed right all the way through to construction.

My Role

I was responsible for translating cultural research into construction-ready documentation — technical drawings, carved relief designs, spatial layouts, and material specifications that builders could follow without losing what made the design meaningful.

Sets I worked on directly: Namor’s Throne Room — the primary Talokan ceremonial space, including the carved reliefs, structural logic, and the red light challenge. The Yucatán hut structures — including the memory room where Shuri receives the bracelet from Namor. Anneka’s riverfront house — shown after the flooding attack. The Talokan civic spaces — street-level environments with statuary, agricultural motifs, and circulation routes. The royal aircraft entry sequence. The 1571 Yucatán flashback sets. Riri Williams’ MIT dorm. The scouting ship helipad and observation room.

Specific Decisions

On the throne room, I designed the carved relief forms to be sculptural enough to catch and hold red light — so VFX had surface geometry to work with when rendering the red wavelength at depth. The forms had to be Mayan in their logic, not just decorative shapes that happened to catch light.

For the civic spaces, I insisted on agricultural motifs — corn specifically — and offering arrangements grounded in actual Mesoamerican practice. These details are what make Talokan feel like a real society with food systems, spiritual practices, and daily life.

For the Talokan structural forms, I used heavy compacted masses and buttressing that could plausibly exist under real water pressure. The city needed to look like it had been engineered by people who understood their physical environment.

For the memory room iconography, I worked from actual Mayan painted wall traditions to ensure the images Shuri sees had a real visual grammar behind them, not invented symbols.

My Judgment

The hardest problem on this film wasn’t technical. It was making Talokan feel like a real civilization — one with history, agriculture, worship, grief, and daily life — rather than a visually spectacular backdrop for superhero action.

I also understood that on this particular film, the stakes of getting it right were higher than usual. Hannah Beachler was making history. The communities whose culture was being represented were watching. I made sure my documentation was bulletproof, my cultural justifications were thorough, and my work gave Hannah’s vision the support it deserved.

Outcome

The Talokan sequences are now studied as an example of how to build a non-Western civilization for speculative fiction with genuine cultural integrity. The underwater city doesn’t read as fantasy — it reads as a place that could have existed, with its own logic, its own history, its own relationship to the physical world.

The specific sets I worked on — the throne room, the memory room, the Yucatán shoreline, Anneka’s flooded house, the aircraft entry platform — appear in some of the film’s most memorable sequences. They hold up because the details are right. Not approximately right. Right.