South African actor John Kani, 79, has denied the Duchess of Sussex’s Meghan Markle, 40, saying he would have compared her marriage to Prince Harry, 37, to the release of leader and activist Nelson Mandela (1918-2013), in 1990, after spending 27 years in prison.
“I never met Meghan Markle,” he said in an interview with the Daily Mail. “I can’t even say which month she got married, not even the year. As I recall, no one [na África do Sul] knew when she got married, or how. We have no ties to the marriage or the relationship.”
Markle said in a recent interview with The Cut magazine that during the release of the live-action film “The Lion King” (2019) in London, a South African actor told her: “I just need you to know: when you married this family, we celebrated in the streets the same way we did when Mandela was released from prison”.
Although the Duchess did not directly mention Kani’s name, the artist stated that he was the only South African actor in the film’s cast, and that he was not present at the film’s London launch. “I went to Hollywood for the release and then straight to Paris to work on another film. The only South African was me, voicing Rafiki,” she added.
The actor was a personal friend of Mandela’s and ended by saying that with the liberation “the whole of South Africa, the entire African continent and the world were watching. [esposa na época] because he waved his hands”.
The actor has a long career in theaters and films, having been in acclaimed films such as “Coriolanus” (2011) and “The Shadow and the Darkness” (1996). Most recently, he played King T’Chaka, father of the hero Black Panther in “Captain America: Civil War” (2016) and “Black Panther” (2018).
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