Mosaku’s character, Annie, plays a key role in the fight to defeat the vampire invasion of her town; She’s determined to protect the people she loves, especially her estranged partner Smoke (Michael B. Jordan). Using her hoodoo practices and deep ancestral magic, Annie is the film’s MVP, protecting and supporting twin brothers Smoke and Stack’s violence against supernatural domination in the South.
Carter shared with Deadline how Annie’s strength, as described in Coogler’s script, was an important inspiration in creating the look for the character. “The whole vision in mind is starting with the script… someone like Annie, who is a route worker – she’s someone who is the community center. During that time people needed someone like her in the community because she was the healer, and they didn’t go to the doctor.”
Carter’s work deeply influenced the character of Mosaku; Watching the designer work was like “watching an alchemist,” Mosaku said. “Every time I stepped into [Carter’s] Studio, Annie became more and more real to me, and she became more and more tangible.
Carter emphasized that Annie’s role in her community was always at the forefront. “You have to know what lives on the clothes; there’s all this representation in the clothes, and for someone like Annie, we connect with what she needs to survive and how that lives in the clothes.”
He added, “We saw these grassroots activists in cinema… and how it’s represented. We’ve seen that; we’ve done that.”
It was important to make Annie her own version of a familiar character type. “At one point we were talking about a headdress, almost like presenting this Hoodoo Queen,” Mosaku said. “But then when we lifted the veil, it was like, ‘Oh, this is who she is.'”
“It was very important to make her not so much a saint but to make her a spiritual force, a feminine woman, a maternal spirit, but also independent,” Carter said. “Let’s make her a real woman and make it about empowering the women in our lives, strong women who nurture the community, not this mysterious character who is so distant from us that we can connect with her.”
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