EXCLUSIVE: As soon as her samurai sword-swinging Michonne character entered The Walking Dead, it was clear Danai Gurira would be an actress to watch. Now, she’s gotten a major feature role: she’ll play Afeni Shakur in the Morgan Creek Tupac Shakur biopic All Eyez On Me. She joins a film that is already underway in Atlanta, with Open Road distributing. The film is directed by Benny Boom, and Demetrius Shipp Jr plays Tupac.

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danaiIn Afeni Shakur (who is an exec producer on the film and the keeper of the flame on her son’s estate), Gurira plays a complex woman. A political activist and member of the Black Panthers, Afeni raised her son to be a voracious reader with a political awareness that informed his development as a street poet. The film covers Tupac’s rise to stardom as a hip-hop artist and actor, as well as his imprisonment and prolific, controversial stint at Death Row Records, where he was steeped in the East Coast/West Coast rap war. It took a long time for this film to make it to the start line. But the timing seems fortuitous after the out-sized grosses of another hip-hop origin story, Straight Outta Compton. The film is produced by James G Robinson and David Robinson of Morgan Creek Productions, along with LT Hutton.

Tupac ShakurGurira’s other screen credits include The Visitor and Mother Of George. She’s also an award-winning playwright: her play Eclipsed, which opened off-Broadway with Lupita N’Yongo starring, moves to Broadway in March, and her play Familiar opens off-Broadway in March.

She is represented by Suskin Management and UTA.