Brow Beat

Chadwick Boseman Plays a Badass Supreme Court Justice in the Trailer for Marshall

The first trailer for Marshall was released Wednesday, and it looks like the most badass cinematic portrayal of a Supreme Court justice since that Steven Segal movie where Linda Thorson gets taken hostage. As Thurgood Marshall, Black Panther’s Chadwick Boseman drinks, smokes, punches, and struts his way through the trailer like he’s playing a private eye, not the man who won Brown v. Board of Education and went on to become the first black Supreme Court justice. The trick is that the film focuses on a case early in Marshall’s career, before he’d been weighted down with the gravitas of a civil rights icon.

The case in question was the defense of Joseph Spell (Sterling K. Brown), a butler and chauffer who was accused in 1940 of kidnapping and raping his employer, Bridgeport, Connecticut, socialite Eleanor Strubing (Kate Hudson). The details were a lot tawdrier than school desegregation, and so the tone looks more like a legal thriller than the kind of sepia-toned hagiography giants like Marshall usually get. That’s all to the good, as long as no one’s trying to set up a Supreme Court Cinematic Universe. The film was directed by Reginald Hudlin, the writer and director behind House Party, and written by father and son screenwriting team Michael and Jacob Koskoff. Marshall will be kicking ass, taking names, and establishing binding legal precedents on Oct. 13.