Angela Bassett’s Kids: Meet The ‘Black Panther’ Star’s Twins, Bronwyn & Slater

Few actresses have had as prolific a career as Angela Bassett, 64, has had. She’s captivated audience for decades from her performances in biopics like What’s Love Got To Do, where she played Tina Turner, to playing comic book characters, like in Black Panther. Throughout much of her lengthy career, she’s been married to stage actor Courtney B. Vance, 62, who she tied the knot with in 1997. In January 2006, the couple had twins Slater and Bronwyn via a surrogate. Angela reprised her role as Queen Ramonda in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, although the film sadly lost star Chadwick Boseman, after he died following his battle with colon cancer.

Her performance in Black Panther 2 earned Angela the Best Supporting Actress award at the 80th Annual Golden Globes. She’s nominated for the same award at the 2023 Oscars, and her Golden Globe win has already sparked Academy Award buzz. Angela opened up about how she celebrated the Golden Globe with her kids in an interview with People in January 2023. “I went home and hugged my kids,” she said. “They were really excited for mom to bring home a statue.”

While she has two little ones of her own, she clearly felt motherly love towards Chadwick. Angela opened up about being glad to see him up for a Golden Globe in a February 2021 interview with Entertainment Tonight. “I know my heart, my son, Chadwick is up for an award, so I’m looking forward to seeing his face pop up on the screen there,” she said. “We miss him terribly, but he was an individual and the work he did is worthy of remembering.”

Angela’s role in the MCU is clearly one that her kids love. When the kids accompanied them to the premiere of the first Black Panther, Courtney explained why they brought their kids along in an interview with ET. “This is a record-breaking, amazing event that we all should cherish. It’s time for us to see that we can make a megahit. We can make a $100 million movie by just showing up,” he said.

With the first film’s success, Angela admitted that the Black Panther getting Oscar nods, she spoke about their twins being excited. “They think it’s pretty cool, and I can see a little pride in their step, and as a mom [or] dad, you need all the points you can get from wherever,” she told ET. 

Many of the actress’s biggest onscreen roles have shown off some of her motherly instincts (such as playing rapper Notorious B.I.G.’s mom Violetta Wallace in Notorious), and the actress has been open about the values she tries to instill in her 17-year-old twins. Angela is clearly a doting mother, and has raved about her children. “It is a joy seeing them growing so beautifully, you know, so bright, so smart, so compassionately, and you just want them to be aware, you know?” she told Closer Weekly in 2019.

The Black Panther star has said that she’s not sure if her kids plan to follow in her and her husband’s footsteps into acting, but she’ll support them no matter what they want to do. “They want to follow the success, but whether it be acting, I don’t get any clues to that right now,” she said in the aforementioned People interview. “It’s a little music, a little sports. But whatever they want to do, I support them.”

Angela has spoken about what a great relationship she has with her kids. She also said that she sends her kids to public school in a 2019 interview with Jimmy Kimmel. “They are in public school. I went to public school, turned out okay by me,” she said at the time. Learn more about Angela’s twins here!

Bronwyn Golden Vance

Angela seems like she’s very close with her daughter. The actress shared an adorable mother-daughter photo of the pair in January 2020. Angela rocked a maroon tracksuit with orange trim, while her little girl wore turquoise leggings and a white sweater. “On a stretch of unspoiled California coastline with my beautiful daughter,” she wrote in the caption.

Besides the sweet hiking photo, Angela has spoken about how Bronwyn, and how her daughter takes after her in a 2019 interview with Vulture. “My daughter, from the time she was a little one, was always sort of looking to me for the example of what to do and how to be,” she said. “If I told her brother something like, ‘Slater, put that down. Slater, don’t stand on that. Slater —’ she would be my little copy. If he would do something, she would say, ‘Slater, put that down! Slater don’t stand on that!’ She was my little copycat.”

Slater Josiah Vance

Angela has been open about the fact that both of her kids are very musically inclined, and her son, Slater, has shown aspirations of being a musician. In May 2019, she posted a photo on Instagram of her son with the rapper Logic and said that the Bobby Tarantino artist influenced him to want to rap about “Peace, love and positivity.” She also explained how Logic was her “son’s favorite performer” during a 2019 appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! “He says he’s the best rapper living or dead,” she said. “Strong opinions.”

Slater has also begun dropping some music under his name. He often promotes his new tunes via his Instagram. He dropped his debut album Journey 2 Forever in October 2021. He followed the record up with a 2022 EP Holehearted.

While he’s still young and figuring out his path, Slater did receive some backlash for a prank he pulled on his mom back in December 2022. While participating in the TikTok trend of children telling their parents that different celebrities had passed away, he had told Angela that her Black Panther co-star Michael B. Jordan had died. His mom was understandably upset in the video. He reportedly shared an apology video (per Business Insider), but it has since been removed also. “I own this mistake and hope this can be a teaching lesson to anyone who uses social media as a tool and a source of entertainment to truly understand that their actions can have consequences that extend beyond you,” he said.

It sounds like both of her kids are very musically inclined. She spoke about how much her kids loved her in the jazz-inspired Disney-Pixar movie Soul on the red carpet for the 2021 Golden Globes, according to People. “They loved it. They both play the piano and rap and play guitar, so they have a little musical interest that I drill into them, that I insist upon,” she said. “They got a lot of the themes, a lot of the ideas from it and really appreciated it.”

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