Additionally, Friend addressed the evolution of Oscar Award nominee Angela Bassett’s look as Queen Ramonda from Black Panther to Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. “I mean, Angela Bassett. What can you say? She’s a queen. She’s really a queen. Even when you meet her, she’s so royal. She’s an actress I had never worked with before Wakanda and was really somebody who I wanted to work with. So I really went through and I looked at all her looks and I was like, ‘What can I do that she hasn’t done?'” she explained.
“So, in the beginning on the first one, in talking to Ryan, we really talked about, ‘How about if she had locs?’ I met his mother and Ryan Coogler’s mother has beautiful long locs, and I was like, ‘How about if we create locs for her? Like really long, beautiful, but keep them in light tones, keep them silver, keep them platinum, keep them blond. Really make her look like the goddess she is,'” she continued. “So I went and I pitched it to Angie, and she was kind of like, ‘Huh…’ I was like, ‘Yup! I have this idea! I want to do these long locs.’ And I showed her pictures and, once we started talking about it, she goes, ‘I think that would really be cool, Camille.'”
“So we talked about it, but for the camera test, we didn’t have the wig built yet, because the wig is a big build. It takes a long time. These are handmade locs. So we just had this horrible, horrible loc wig,” she recalled. “Basically, the front of it was kind of gray, and she was like, ‘This is ugly, this color.’ So literally, I was like, ‘Okay, the back of it is lighter.’ We turn the wig around. This is for the camera test. We turn the wig around, we put the light part forward, and I was like, ‘I need a wrap or a scarf.’ So I just pinned it all up. We put the wrap around it and that’s how we got it approved. Then, after that, I built the wig for it. So that’s how the beginning of it started, just to give you a little back history on the beginning of it.”
“Of course, in the opening scene [of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever], she has on the original wig from the first Black Panther. But how we got to her look in this one is, talking to Ryan, he really wanted Shuri and Ramonda to have—like, in West African culture, how people are in mourning and they shave their heads. So we’re looking at, ‘How would they look a year after they had shaved their heads?’ So that’s how we landed on the look that we had,” she said. “So I wanted to keep her in the same color family, but I wanted to make her hair shorter. But I was like, ‘What kind of style?’ So I started looking at the pictures of [costume designer] Ruth Carter, what she does with the hat. I was like, ‘If I keep her hair the same original color, but make her hair like a crown, I think it was something that would look really beautiful.’ And that’s what we did, and here we are.”
