It isn’t a hard question: Where do you live?
But Dominique Thorne, the 27-year-old star of Marvel’s new “Ironheart” mini-series, needed a moment to answer because, well, honestly, she wasn’t sure.
She had just gotten back from two weeks in Japan. Before that, she spent seven months in Thailand, where she “ate my way across the country.” (“As a pescatarian, it was like a dream come true,” she said.)
And now she was about to embark on a press tour to promote the six-part “Ironheart,” premiering Tuesday on Disney+, in which she reprises the role of Riri Williams, the brilliant young inventor and M.I.T. student from the 2022 movie “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” That tour will take her from New York, where she was born, to Los Angeles, where she holed up for a few months during the pandemic, to Atlanta, where parts of the show were filmed and where her parents and two younger brothers live.
“I’m at the point where I’m thinking now about where I want to settle down,” she said on a Monday afternoon last month, her big brown eyes sparkling as she settled in to a velour couch in the lobby of the Hotel Chelsea, in Manhattan. (For now, her mailing address is in New York.)
She pulled an oversize Malcolm X sweatshirt over a sleeveless white top and green cargo pants. Her purple ombré nails glinted in the sunlight streaming in from the adjoining solarium as she reached for a cup of tea.
“I’m always cold,” she said as she dipped a tea bag into her mug in the over-air-conditioned lobby bar.
At 5-foot-1 and with hoodie sleeves that swallowed up her hands, Thorne could have easily passed for 10 years younger. She nearly does in “Ironheart,” which begins with Riri still enrolled as a student at M.I.T., where she began at 15. Riri is attempting to refine a high-tech suit of armor that would rival that of Tony Stark, also known as Iron Man. Unfortunately, her fund-raising methods are questionable.
The new mini-series is set after the events of “Wakanda Forever.” Early in the pilot, Riri is expelled from M.I.T. and returns to her hometown, Chicago, where she hopes to continue her work. To that end, she winds up joining a gang of criminals led by the mysterious but charming activist Parker Robbins (Anthony Ramos), also known as “The Hood.”
That Thorne would suit up to be Marvel’s newest superhero is in keeping with the general trend of her brief but incandescent career thus far. Riri is the latest of several headstrong characters Thorne has played onscreen. She didn’t consciously aim to specialize in such roles, she said. Those are just the parts people keep casting her to play.
Whitney White, who directed her in “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” on Broadway in 2023, said she had been struck by Thorne’s commitment to the particulars of her characters.
“It’s like in ‘The Matrix’ when Neo’s like, ‘I don’t know how to do this, but I’ll figure it out,’” White said. “And then they download it into their brain and then do it”
Thorne, who was raised in the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn by Trinidadian immigrant parents, became interested in acting at a young age. Her father drove her to auditions when she was in elementary school. But her parents were emphatic: Academics had to come first.
Still, when high school rolled around, she lobbied them to let her attend a performing arts high school. They eventually agreed — as long as her grades were “perfect,” she said: “A’s, A+’s only.”
At Professional Performing Arts School in Manhattan, she threw herself into theater, making a memorable turn as Puck in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” True to her word, she didn’t let her grades slip. She won a national YoungArts award for spoken theater and was named a U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts by the White House her senior year.
She never truly thought of acting as her future back then, she insisted. Her mother was still steering her toward a more stable career path. “I never thought, Oh, this would translate to a career,” she said. She was accepted into Cornell, but her major wasn’t in the performing arts — or any kind of arts. It was in human development, with a minor in inequality studies.
“I was curious about immigration legislation,” Thorne said, citing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which then-President Barack Obama had implemented in 2012 to protects hundreds of thousands of young immigrants from deportation. “I was like, Let me give the next four years to studying this other thing I’m super intrigued by.”
She still did theater on the side, acting in a couple of plays on campus and sending out self-made audition videos for film and TV roles. Despite having no feature film credits, she auditioned during her sophomore year for the role of Shuri, the courageous and tech-savvy younger sister of T’Challa in the first “Black Panther” movie. She didn’t land the role, but she made it all the way to a screen test with Chadwick Boseman, the actor who played T’Challa, a.k.a., Black Panther. (Boseman died of colon cancer in 2020, at age 43.)
The part went ultimately to Letitia Wright. Thorne’s rejection notice from Disney, she said, was the “kindest rejection ever.”
“They were very, very supportive of me,” she added. “It was: ‘We love you. We think you’re great. You just need more experience.’”
Her feature debut came in 2018 with Barry Jenkins’s adaptation of the James Baldwin novel “If Beale Street Could Talk.” It was her first time on a professional film set, and she had to shoot her scenes during a fall break from classes. She soaked up everything she could — “filling her cup,” she said — while chatting with Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Regina King and Colman Domingo between scenes.
“It was a healthy challenge to see what actual excellence looks like,” Thorne said.
She followed that in 2019 by landing a role playing Judy Harmon, the Black Panther Party member, in “Judas and the Black Messiah” — a total surprise, she said, and just as she was about accept a 9-to-5 job after graduation. Her chances hadn’t seemed terribly promising after the audition with Shaka King, the film’s director, which King cut short, much earlier than she expected.
“I was like, oh, I guess I didn’t get it,” Thorne said.
But King had ended the audition not because she had bombed but because she had nailed it so thoroughly, the director said in a recent phone conversation.
“I knew what I was looking for in the character, and she was the only person who demonstrated that — a calm iciness that needed to be very intimidating, but with a quiet stillness as well,” he said.
Thorne’s performance in “Judas” reminded Ryan Coogler, the director of “Black Panther” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” of that young woman who had first caught his attention a few years before. Cast against physical type as an enforcer for the Panthers, she nonetheless held her own onscreen, said Coogler, who was a producer of the film and is an executive producer of “Ironheart.”
“She’s smaller in stature, but her charisma and her skill set as a performer really made up for it,” Coogler said in a voice memo.
Thorne had put “Work With Ryan Coogler” on a vision board she created in 2020 — she got the call from Marvel that she had been cast in “Wakanda Forever” a few weeks later. “That was pretty amazing,” she said. The job came with an added sweetener: the promise of a leading role in an eventual spinoff series.
Thorne said she was excited for young Black girls watching the show to see a character who is more complicated than the intelligent nerd cliché.
“She’s a genius, but she’ll also run somebody’s pockets,” she said. “Getting to show that complexity — of what it’s like to be young, Black and from Chicago — is beautiful.”
Asked what’s next, Thorne said she honestly didn’t know. She had the press tour to get through, then a voice role in the coming “Marvel Zombies” animated mini-series. Otherwise her calendar was clear.
But she had a more pressing question to answer: Where does she want to be call home? She needs space for her dog, Katana, a 4-year-old Pomsky (Pomeranian-husky mix), and to indulge her crochet and baking habits. (“My signature cookie is a brown butter dark chocolate chip,” she said.) She also thinks she’d like to try surfing.
“I really like Southern California,” she said. “I’d love to be somewhere warm.”
Sarah Bahr writes about culture and style for The Times.
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