Chadwick Boseman Teared Up While Discussing Receiving Letters From Kids Who Lost Their Lives To Cancer

After the shocking death of actor Chadwick Boseman, social media has been teeming with moving tributes, from colleagues and fans alike, to a performer taken away from us far too soon. Plenty of clips have been shared, not only from his movies but from appearances during press junkets, awards shows, and so forth. One of the most gutting ones hails from the Black Panther press tour in 2018, and it finds him breaking down as he speaks about receiving letters from kids who succumbed to cancer.

“There are two little kids, Ian and Taylor, who recently passed from cancer, and throughout our filming, I was communicating with them, knowing that they were both terminal,” Boseman tells reporters. “And their parents said, ‘They’re trying to hold on until this movie comes.’…It’s a humbling experience, because you’re like, ‘This can’t mean that much to them.’ But seeing how the world has taken this on, how it’s taken on a life of its own, I realize that they anticipated something great.”

We now know that Boseman was himself dealing with his own health battles, having been diagnosed with stage III colon cancer in 2016. But at the time he was keeping the news quiet. But he still found a way to relate his own experiences with these kids’ hardships.

“I think back now to [being] a kid, and waiting for Christmas to come, waiting for my birthday to come, waiting for a toy that I was gonna get a chance to experience, or a video game, I did live life waiting for those moments,” Boseman said. “And so it put me back in the mind of being a kid, just to experience those two little boys’ anticipation of this movie.”

It’s at this point that Boseman breaks down, finally willing himself to be able to say, “Yeah. It means a lot.”

The clip is one a of number being shared that find Boseman seeming to cryptically acknowledge his own health concerns. In another, from 2017, comes from an interview he did with The Huffington Post’s Matthew Jacobs, who asked him about the difficulty of weight fluctuations between various projects. “Oh, you don’t even know,” Boseman responded with a laugh. “You have no idea. One day I’ll live to tell the story.”

Boseman was only 43.