Zimbabwe: How Danai Gurira Went From 'Zombie-Slayer' to Superstar

When Black Panther star Danai Gurira was five-years-old, her parents moved her from Grinnell, Iowa, population 9 218, to their homeland of Harare -- a bustling, urban city over two-and-a-half-thousand times bigger than the rural former factory town where she was born.

She looked like a local girl, but spoke like a kid from the Midwestern plains. "An American accent isn't unusual," says Gurira on a brisk afternoon in Los Angeles, "but sometimes from somebody who looks like me." Later, her high school theatre friends would give her the nickname Megaphone because she had an American girl's courage to speak her mind. "My voice was really loud," she claims, grinning. But "no one made fun of my accent. They were so used to it from movies."

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