Tenoch Huerta Flaunts Indigenous Pride With the Headpiece He’ll Be Wearing in Black Panther 2
New images featuring Tenoch Huerta’s Namor from “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” debuted this week on the cover of Empire Magazine, a British publication focused on pop culture.
One of them has Huerta standing side-by-side with the film’s two stars, Letitia Wright and Angela Bassett, while the other focuses on the character’s colorful headdress, inspired by Mayan and Incan imagery, reports Collider.
The highly-anticipated sequel to 2018’s “Black Panther,” which hits theaters on November 11, has been somewhat overshadowed by a larger conversation about star Chadwick Boseman’s absence from the film following his untimely death in 2020.
However, Marvel is working hard to get fans back to theaters and giving them more reasons to watch the new movie even without Boseman’s presence.
Among those efforts is the presence of Mexican actor Tenoch Huerta, who has found mainstream success in recent years thanks to roles in Netflix’s “Narcos” and movies like “The Forever Purge,” along with Ana de la Reguera and Josh Lucas.
Huerta had mostly worked in independent movies until fairly recently, and thanks to roles like this one in a mega-production, he’s becoming an exciting addition to Hollywood’s growing roster of Latinos on the screen.
The Empire Magazine covers are building even more hype for a movie that has had fans desperate for more since the original film was released. Although the first cover features Huerta wearing the headdress, the second cover gives a much more in-depth look at the piece, complete with an underwater background to highlight Namor’s origins as the Sub-Mariner.
Looking more closely at the headdress featured on the cover, you might notice some images both from the film and from production, like a black-and-white image towards the bottom that shows two crew members wearing masks while working on set.
According to the Hindustan Times, the rest of the piece is adorned with well-known Mayan and Incan patterns and imagery.
Although it is covered in gold in the second image, the headdress seen on the first cover reflects a more aquatic aesthetic, with a blue color scheme that pairs with Namor as the leader of Talocan, an underwater society of warriors that functions as a kind of parallel to Wakanda, which used its superior technology to hide from the rest of the world in plain sight in the original film.
As a sequel that had to proceed without its star and one that will be wrapping up Phase 4 of the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe), there’s a lot of pressure on “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” to succeed both critically and at the box office.
The cast and crew banded together to create the next chapter in the “Black Panther” saga, but some of them, as Letitia Wright shared in an interview with Comic Book, had a hard time going back to set.
“It was hard for me to imagine being on set without my brother. It was something I was battling for months,” she said. “I can’t wait for you guys to see the film and how we beautifully honored Chad.”
