It was 2:30 a.m. on a hot summer night, but director Ash Avildsen was determined to squeeze a few extra shots out of a tired group of extras. The wrestlers, actors, and movie buffs dressed in period costume had already endured a long night, witnessing a match between Mildred Burke and Babs Wingo; the introductions of Mildred Burke and Gladys “Kill ‘Em” Gillem; and some magical moments with one of the finest character actors alive, Walton Goggins.
It was hot, it was late, but no one was really itching to go home. We were making a movie!
Following the directions from the crew, the extras rose from their seats in the sixth floor ballroom of the Henry Clay building and formed up on both sides of the entryway leading to the ring. “We’re going to film all the entrances,” the assistant director announced. “First we will bring out the bad guys, and then the good guys.”
The AD shouted instructions for how the crowd should react to each wrestler. We booed and hissed savagely for Mae Young and Gorgeous George. We booed, but with hesitation, when the dangerous June Byers approached. Then the babyfaces took their turns. We cheered our heads off for Mildred Burke. We whooped it up for Nell Stewart. Last but not least, we cheered a 6’4” African American who dropped his robe as soon as he breached the curtain and marched to the ring like a man on a mission.
“Oooh, who was that?” a lady across from me said.
My daughter Lydia turned to check on me. She and my son Sam had been with me all night, getting their first behind-the-scenes look at movie making while meeting a few of their favorite OVW stars. Lydia knew what that moment meant for me. I had hinted at such on the way into downtown twelve hours earlier.
“Are you okay, Dad?” she asked.
I nodded. “I just saw The Black Panther.”
If you’re not familiar, “The Black Panther” Jim Mitchell was one of the greatest African American wrestling stars of his generation and the subject of my 2019 book, The Original Black Panther. A native of Louisville, Kentucky, he broke into the business as a young man, trained by Welterweight Champion Jack Reynolds. He wrestled all over the United States and toured Canada, Australia, and Europe. He opened a liquor store, Black Panther Carry-Out, in his adopted home of Toledo, Ohio, and he loved when the neighborhood kids would stop in gaze at the wrestling photos of his old friends on the wall.
Seeing “The Black Panther” Jim Mitchell on a movie screen at the Louisville premiere was a thrill, but it paled to that summer night in 2023. I might have seen it happen again, had the fire alarm not brought the whole evening to a screeching halt.
Fortunately, it would not be my last interaction with the man who brought Jim Mitchell to life, Khalid Greenaway. The two of us started exchanging messages on Instagram shortly after his time on the set came to an end, and in late February, right after I saw the Louisville premiere, the two of us sat down to discuss how Khalid became The Black Panther.
Unlike many of his cast mates, who had little exposure to professional wrestling before the movie, Khalid Greenaway was a big fan as a child. Growing up on the island of St. Croix, he and his family loved watching the larger-than-life exploits of Dusty Rhodes, Hulk Hogan, Hacksaw Jim Duggan, and The Road Warriors. “We were always pretending to be the wrestlers and injuring one another.”
The acting bug bit Greenaway at an early age. His mother, who raised Khalid by herself, encouraged his love of acting, music, and art. He sang in the church choir, played piano, and loved to draw. His mother helped him get some work as an extra in a few movies.
As much as he loved performing, his father, who was largely absent, was against having his son in the theater. “He was completely against me being in the arts because he didn’t think there was a way to make money in it, and he didn’t like the idea of me doing something he thought was soft.”
Greenaway took some teasing from friends for his love of music and acting as well, but it was an opportunity on the basketball court that led him to put performing on the back burner. He was dunking by the age of 13, and his coaches projected big things for him. “I got up at 5 a.m. every morning to jog and do plyometrics, and I worked with a trainer after school. They were predicting big things for me, but then, I tore my quad.”
The injury wasn’t the only obstacle Greenaway faced in his basketball dream. He nearly flunked out of school. “To tell the truth, I was trying to flunk out. But they still passed me!”
He came back to basketball at the end of his senior year. He struggled, but he did enough to get a scholarship to Bloomfield College in New Jersey.
New Jersey was a struggle for Greenaway, who wasn’t used to the harsh winters and found the community less friendly than his home in St. Croix. He transferred to UNC Greensboro, where he planned to play as a walk-on, but he was expelled before the pre-season started. He ended up playing for tiny Greensboro College across the street.
Greenaway also became involved in ministry doing this time. He worked as a youth pastor, led Bible studies, and did a lot of work in the community. He had an offer to play pro ball in Greece, but he chose not to take the offer after hearing his mother was sick. After consulting with his pastor, he walked away from basketball and made the decision to take care of his mother, moving her to North Carolina.
“Instead of getting one job to support her, I got three jobs,” he said. “I worked in the school system with at-risk youth, I worked at a clothing store on the weekends, and I did work with autistic children through a community support agency.”
Khalid Greenaway knew he couldn’t work three jobs and survive on four hours sleep forever, so he started looking for new opportunities. He joined the fire department. He became a realtor, specializing in revitalizing foreclosed properties.
It sounds random, but the real estate in particular was a strategic move. Seeing a need or more mental health care for students, his dream was to open an agency that would provide counseling and residential care. Part of the long term plan was to own the buildings he would use in that agency, and real estate gave him the opportunity to learn a great deal.
Greenaway didn’t want to depend on other professionals in his agency, so he went back to school to become a licensed therapist. His agency grew and thrived over the next ten years, but Greenaway found himself sitting in more meetings and fewer therapy sessions, he started to feel miserable.
By this time he was married with kids, and his wife Angela knew her husband needed a new challenge. “She’s the reason I am acting now.”
The pull to be an actor never left Khalid Greenaway. Even during his college years, when it was all about basketball, friends and even strangers suggested he go to auditions or even do some modeling. “I used to get mad about it,” he said. “I was a serious ball player. I didn’t have time for that! Truthfully, I always wanted to do it, but it seemed so unreachable. Still Angela and a childhood friend, Soneil Charles, kept encouraging me to get into acting and modeling.”
Angela Greenaway had brought acting up before. She learned about her husband’s passion for the arts when they were first dating, and she’d suggested he try it again on a few occasions. He’d even had a lady approach him at a conference he organized and tell him God had urged her to invite him to an acting class. “I lost her card, and I was too embarrassed to ask the people who worked for me for the card of a lady who taught acting.”
Angela was taking classes to become a certified life coach when she met a music producer named Monte Sharrod. Sharrod told Angela about an acting coach named Burgess Jenkins who gave classes at at The Actor’s Group in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Angela urged her husband Khalid to give it a try.
Three classes in, he was ready to quit. “We were doing an acting game called Projection, an exercise that’s supposed to help you take off the masks you wear, to stop being politically correct and be more raw and authentic. I did terrible, and as I was walking back to my seat, I said in my head, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna quit.’
“I had a lot of things on my mind in that moment. Funds were being mismanaged at work, and the business had grown so big so fast, it was hard to keep track of. There was so much happening at one time, and after struggling through Projection, I said to myself, not out loud, that I was done.
“Then Burgess says, ‘No, you’re not gonna quit! You’re too talented! You’re too smart. You’re too brilliant to quit!’ It wasn’t the first time he’d said something like that to me, but after hearing Burgess speak, I thought, ‘Maybe I won’t quit.’”
Greenaway stayed with it. He found himself working through many emotions as he went through the exercises at The Actor’s Group. He then studied the Chubbuck technique with Jonna Naegle. “Coach Jonna helped me to understand a structured way to perform scene analysis, and give my characters a deep internal world, how to be a professional. The Chubbuck technique took my acting to another level.”
Under Coach Jonna, he entered and won some monologue competitions. He studied with LA acting coach Zach Barnette, taking his sixteen week course “The Art of the Break Through” for sixteen weeks. He discovered a book by Dr. Jonas Dispenza called Becoming Supernatural, which taught him to meditate and shed the expectations of other people – starting with his father.
Stepping out on faith, Greenaway made the decision to sell off and close parts of his company. “I had to pay employees, transition hundreds of clients, so many things. My wife was so amazing. I asked her what we were going to go, and she said, ‘We’ll figure it out. All I want you to do is pursue your passion because I feel like this is the direction you’re supposed to go.’”
Angela saw her husband becoming more his true self, as he rediscovered the passions from his childhood. He started getting roles in theater. He found a new opportunity to continue doing therapy that was more flexible with his acting pursuits. When he found out his accountant had not only mismanaged his profits but failed to pay his taxes, a business partner floated him some money that helped Khalid and his family get through a challenging time.
Meanwhile a huge cast of actors, coaches, and managers continued to help Khalid Greenaway along the road to becoming a professional actor. He learned how to do an audition, how to get modeling work, and he started going out for film roles.
Which led him to Ash Avildsen’s production, Queen of the Ring, a moment that let Khalid Greenaway live out a childhood dream. Greenaway was asked to film an audition and submit it through the casting director. He went all out for the moment.
“I always wanted to be Hulk Hogan, and this was my chance. They gave me a real microphone, and I went for it. I ripped off my shirt, started flexing, egging the crowd on, and dropped the mic at the end.”
Greenaway was struggling at the time. He had not booked any work in some time. He was driving home from the gym one night in tears when his agent called to tell him they loved the audition.
“I booked some theatrical work in Atlanta and was preparing for that. One night, I was sitting at the dining room table and got a call from a Beverly Hills number. Its was Ash. ‘Hey, man, are you in the trailer? We’re getting ready to film!’ I said, ‘No.’ Ash called my manager and his assistant director. Then I got a call from my manager. It was crazy, but I was ready to take the next flight to Louisville.”
Despite the mix up in communication, there was no one else Ash Avildsen wanted for the role of Jim Mitchell. Avildsen discovered the Jim Mitchell story while scouting locations for the film in Louisville and doing research on the time. Mitchell was hardly instrumental to the Mildred Burke story, but he was one of Gorgeous George’s greatest rivals. It was an opportunity to shed light on a true trailblazer in professional wrestling.
Even if his screen time was very brief.
The Black Panther’s big moment happens quickly, and it used to further the story of George Wagner’s evolution to Gorgeous George. Mitchell and George are seen talking trash, presumably backstage, rehearsing promos with promoter Jack Pfefer.
“Our scene was supposed to be filmed the night before in the ring, but we had to change it,” said Greenaway. “I went to Ash and said, ‘What if we did the scene like we were making it up, me and Adam and Walt?’ They both loved the idea.”
Everything Khalid learned in his acting classes came to the fore on set. Improvising with actor Adam Demos, who played Gorgeous George, and Walton Goggins as Jack Pfefer, he put himself in the moment, allowing to the words Gorgeous George spoke about Jim Mitchell and responding with all the emotion he felt. “In that moment, it almost felt like a spiritual experience, as if Jim Mitchell showed up and was responding directly to Gorgeous George.”
It’s a powerful moment on screen, a verbal clash between the smarmy, arrogant, white heel and the proud African American challenger. Greenaway tapped into the promoter part of Jim Mitchell, the side that knew how to sell himself as an attraction, all the while never losing sight of the underlying truth of the moment: Jim Mitchell and Gorgeous George were friends, as demonstrated in a beautiful twist at the end of their scene.
Working alongside a celebrated actor like Walton Goggins made it easy. “Walt is such a phenomenal actor. I had so much fun improvising with him. And Ash is an extraordinary director. So easy to work for and work with. That film did so much for may confidence, and I am so grateful to him!”
The hard work continued after Khalid Greenaway left Louisville, Kentucky. Over the last year he traveled back and forth from North Carolina to Philadelphia, studying with Tony Savant at The Actors Playhouse West In Philly. “Tony taught me about the genius of the Meisner Technique, and about Sanford Meisner who trained Tony is a writer and taught me the importance of understanding writing and production. He also taught me to create my own lane if necessary.”
Greenaway signed with Jonna Naegle, who now represents him as manager through Bromfield Entertainment. He’s found work on the stage and continued his training, not only in acting but the crafts of screenwriting and film production. “I’m so grateful Coach Jonna, and to all the people who helped me along the way. I’ve learned how important it is to understand film production, how it can really help you as an actor.”
Khalid Greenaway knows his journey would not have been possible with out direction from God, who put so many people in his path to steer him towards acting. He’s grateful for a mother who nurtured his love for performing, and Angela, who never wavered in her belief that acting was where Khalid belonged.
Greenaway is eager to win more acting roles, and he has a few stories in mind he wants to bring to the screen himself. Chief among them: Jim Mitchell. “I haven’t been able to shake the Jim Mitchell story. He was a renaissance man, and a business man. I was wondering what his life was like, with segregation and all. It’s such an incredible story. I’d love to see it on screen.”
Revisiting Jim Mitchell on screen would likely give Greenaway a chance to do something he missed out on with Queen of the Ring. “I didn’t get to do any wrestling! The girls and Adam got to train at OVW, but I didn’t because there was no wrestling for me in the script.”
If there’s a Black Panther movie in Khalid Greenaway’s future, you better believe another Boyhood Dream will come to pass.
