Chadwick Boseman’s Widow Shares Acceptance Speech She Would Have Given Had He Won Oscar

Simone Ledward Boseman, the widow of the beloved actor Chadwick Boseman, granted a rare interview for The Hollywood Reporter’s in-depth oral history of the Covid Oscars ceremony that took place five years ago, as part of which she shared, for the first time, the remarks that she would have given had her husband not been upset in the best actor race — he was nominated for his performance in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom — at the very end of the night.

“I had written a whole speech,” Ledward Boseman recalled. “I wonder if I have it in my Notes.” After searching for it on her computer, she found it: “Oh! It says: I will never stop thanking God for you. Thank you to the most high God. Thank you, Carolyn and Leroy Boseman [Chadwick’s parents], and your mothers, and your mothers’ mothers. What purity. What honesty. What pain. What a role.