Michael B. Jordan Takes On His First Blockbuster Role—as a Villain

“People will be like, ‘Is he your dad?’ ” he says, shaking his head. “And really mean it.”

It’s a weekday in late autumn, and Jordan and I have grabbed a back booth at Jon & Vinny’s, a narrow Italian restaurant in Los Angeles, where the lunchtime crowd, louder than a hockey game, is mercifully beginning to thin. We’re splitting a pizza with burrata cheese that is so delicious I want to write it love letters. Jordan’s dressed in a camouflage-green pullover, jeans and a pair of classic—well, he’s wearing a pair of classic red-and-black Jordans.

There’s a lot less confusion these days between the planet’s two famous MJs. The basketball Jordan is running his Charlotte Hornets, safely ensconced as one of the greatest athletes of all time. Michael B. Jordan—the B stands for Bakari, Swahili for “one with promise”—is a former child actor from Newark, New Jersey, with a sterling early résumé (The Wire, Friday Night Lights, Parenthood) who blossomed into a bona fide movie star with a groundbreaking role in 2013’s Fruitvale Station and a transformative turn as boxing scion Adonis “Donnie” Creed in Creed—the triumphant reimagining that lifted the Rocky Balboa franchise off the canvas.

Now comes Black Panther, the eagerly awaited dive into the Marvel comic universe from Jordan’s friend and collaborator, Creed and Fruitvale Station director Ryan Coogler. The film—which chronicles the story of T’Challa, aka Black Panther, king of Wakanda, a fictional African nation—has been the source of frenzied fan excitement for a few years now, partly because of the 31-year-old Coogler’s growing reputation as a visionary, but also because it is a big-budgeted epic about a black superhero, starring a dream cast of black actors, among them Jordan, Oscar winners Lupita Nyong’o and Forest Whitaker, and Chadwick Boseman (42, Get On Up) in the title role.

It’s absurd that it took until 2018 to get here, but in Hollywood, Black Panther is a Very Big Deal.

“It’s something that hasn’t been done before,” says Jordan. “I think it’s a perfect time for this movie.”

There’s also this: For the first time in his career, Jordan is going truly bad, playing a villain, Black Panther’s burly nemesis, Erik Killmonger—“something I’ve never done before,” Jordan says. To prep, he studied great villain performances, like Heath Ledger as the Joker in The Dark Knight and Michael Fassbender in…a lot of Michael Fassbender things. “I felt competitive,” Jordan says. “I wanted to build a performance that people will remember. Something different. Grow my hair out? Cool. I’ll grow my hair for a year. Put on 20 pounds? I’ll put on 20 pounds.”

To clarify: He’s talking about 20 pounds of muscle. “Everything,” Jordan says. “Chest, shoulders, back. My legs a little bit, my quads. I was just, like, massive.”

This dedication is a celebrated part of Jordan’s origin story. For Creed, he shredded himself into a fighting machine with an enviable eight-pack set of abdominals. For Black Panther, Jordan was right back at it with the weights and monastic eating restrictions.

“It’s a job, man,” he says, clearly enjoying our midday carb feast, which is not his norm. “You really have to diet. It’s hard to be social. You have to drink a gallon and a half of water. When you’re drinking a gallon and a half of water a day, you know how many times you have to use the bathroom? It’s annoying.”

Body work didn’t make Jordan a movie star, however. His undeniable magnetism did. From the early stages of Jordan’s career, he’s taken roles, often small ones, and consistently turned out engaging, fully formed humans. The young drug runner Wallace in The Wire; quarterback Vince Howard in Friday Night Lights; recovering alcoholic Alex in Parenthood; underdog boxer Creed—all of them could have been played as standard character types. But Jordan made them multidimensional, empathetic, riveting. In Fruitvale Station, in which he played Oscar Grant—a Bay Area native shot and killed in Oakland, California, by a transit police officer who was later convicted of involuntary manslaughter—Jordan portrayed a complex person of intelligence and vulnerability (and humor), which countered the usual media caricatures. It still feels mildly insane that neither Fruitvale nor Jordan was nominated for an Academy Award in 2014.

Audiences, it seems, really like watching Michael B. Jordan on the screen, and it’s made him a sought-after talent. A few hours before we’d met up, I’d read an excited blog post listing the top five reasons to see Black Panther, and the No. 1 reason was: “Michael B. Jordan is always awesome.”

“I think Mike has a way of making you care,” says Coogler, who calls Jordan “incredibly relatable” on screen and off.

“I think some of it is natural—he’s got a natural charisma. But he’s put time into it. There’s been a lot of hard work on craft, too.”

“There’s a skill to humanizing what’s on a page and making it sing,” says Tessa Thompson, who co-starred alongside Jordan in Creed as Bianca, Donnie’s musician girlfriend. “With Michael, I think there’s a sweetness that’s rare and lights up a screen. The reason that audiences love him is because they can feel close to him.”

In person, Jordan is an engaging mix of confidence and humility—the exact opposite of wishy-washy. Though he’s still young (he turns 31 in February), he’s been working for more than half of his life and sees an opportunity to make this his moment.

“I’m ambitious,” he says. “I see what actors I look up to have, the types of platforms they have and their ability to create and tell stories they want—I want that. Why not?” He credits his father, Michael A. Jordan, who served in the Marines, for his drive: “The one thing my dad always told me is ‘You’ve got to be serious about something.’ ”

It’s easy to say it now, but you can see Jordan’s potential from his early days on The Wire, in which his character, Wallace, is a smart but immature soldier struggling in the drug trade. Jordan was 14 when he was cast, still living with his family in Newark, but it’s a breathtakingly nuanced performance for a young actor. Wire fanatics are still crushed that Wallace met his demise late in the show’s first season.

I ask Jordan what he remembers about his young acting self.

“I think I had heart,” he says. “I felt like I could achieve anything…but I was still trying to make myself believe it was possible.” He mimics his adolescent insecurity: “What am I doing? When is the dream going to stop? When are we going to find out I’m not an actor?”

Jordan vividly recalls when he found out Wallace was going to be killed. He’d had a feeling his time was coming. Wallace had been questioning his role in the drug world and was getting high himself, which made Jordan think, Uh-oh. When he got the script for the penultimate episode of season one, he did what he always did, which was to flip through it to find his last line, to make sure he was still OK.

This time, Wallace was not OK. Jordan said he cried when he read it. “I remember being in my trailer and [Wire creator] David Simon knocked on the door,” he says. “He was like, ‘We love you. Everybody loves you. You’re going to be great. You’re going to do amazing things—but it’s the reason we gotta kill you.’ ”

It sounds like the type of polite thing you’re supposed to say to an actor you’re about to finish off, but Simon tells me he truly believed it, that he’d been staggered by how well Jordan had inhabited Wallace. He says his decision to kill off the character rattled not just Jordan, but also members of the show’s crew. “I remember hearing from people you don’t normally hear from,” he says. “ ‘How can you do this?’ ”

To Simon, this was evidence of what Jordan had done, which was to imbue Wallace with such “humanity and grace” that the people who worked with him every day felt a genuine bond. Keep in mind these were the early days of The Wire—nobody was really watching it; it would be years before The Wire became OMG, You Need to Watch The Wire, venerated as one of the greatest shows in TV history. This was just Jordan, a kid, on a set in Baltimore.

But it is a decade and a half later, and Simon does not sound the least bit surprised we’re talking about Michael B. Jordan as a movie star. Says Simon: “I thought if he stays in this game, we’d all be asking him for work one day.”

RECENTLY, JORDAN has begun branching out beyond acting. He’s launched a production company, Outlier Society Productions—a nod to the Malcolm Gladwell book—and already has multiple projects in the works, including Raising Dion, a Netflix series about a kid who discovers he has magical abilities; Super Day Care, an animated series about a day-care center for superheroes; and a South Florida teenage drama in the works with Moonlight co-writer Tarell Alvin McCraney. Jordan has also signed on for his directorial debut with The Stars Beneath Our Feet, an adaptation of David Barclay Moore’s novel about a young teenager in Harlem who uses Legos to build a fantasy world.

Jordan sees his production company as a natural next step in a career during which he’s studied a lot of experienced pros. “I’ve been fortunate to work with really talented people who were a lot better than me,” Jordan says. “Idris Elba, Connie Britton, Kyle Chandler, Sly [Stallone], Tessa Thompson.” He pauses. “I know I’m missing some people, but I’ve worked with so many veterans…and I was always ready to learn other people’s jobs, the grips, DPs, producers, script supervisors. You kind of assemble your own utility belt of things.”

Jordan credits Friday Night Lights creator Peter Berg, an actor-turned-filmmaker himself, for encouraging him to build his own shop.

“How do you control your own destiny?” Jordan recalls Berg telling him. “By creating.”

Much has been written about the current gold rush of development in Hollywood, where digital companies like Amazon and Netflix have spurred a surge in demand for original content.

“It’s a little bit like the Wild West right now,” Jordan says. At the same time, he thinks studios are showing a new openness to projects from filmmakers who were historically given short shrift—or ignored altogether.

“It’s the best time to be a person of color in Hollywood who’s creative and has original projects,” he says. “Everybody wants that right now.”

Not that it’s ever easy to actually make something, Jordan stresses. “People don’t really understand how hard it is to get a production done,” he says, leaning forward in the booth. “How many people, how many hours, how many moving pieces have to fall into place. It’s not like a song, where someone can go into a booth and get it done. Film is such a team sport.

“That’s why Black Panther is so important,” he continues. “There are so many things that had to happen for Marvel to get on board, for

Disney

to get behind the message that we’re getting behind. Ryan [Coogler] had to be the perfect guy; he had to earn his stripes, earn his budget.”

Judging from the advance excitement, Black Panther looks as though it might turn out to be one of those oh, duh moments for Hollywood, just as director Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman was when it earned $800 million last summer: Wait, you mean if we make a smart, mass-appeal movie that recognizes a huge chunk of the moviegoing public, it might be a giant hit?

“That’s how I feel,” Jordan says. “I feel like it’s a timing thing.”

Jordan has a special bond with Coogler; with Black Panther, the actor and director have now made three movies together—and a fourth, Wrong Answer, about the Atlanta schools testing scandal, is in the works, with a script being written by Ta-Nehisi Coates. It’s tempting to see a Scorsese/De Niro–style partnership brewing. Jordan says that he and Coogler have an almost unspoken work dynamic now. He knows what Coogler wants before the director even asks.

“I trust him with my life,” Jordan says. “I literally want to do all of his movies.”

“When we first met, there was this ease of communication,” says Coogler, who was born in Oakland. “We’re roughly the same age, from similar-type places. We’ve become like family from working on projects this intense.”

This spring, Jordan will appear alongside Michael Shannon in an HBO movie version of Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s dystopian classic. Jordan plays Guy Montag, the book-burning fireman who begins to question his role in an anti-intellectual society. Bradbury’s novel is more than six decades old, but amid the continued uproar over “fake news” and disinformation, it feels startlingly current. Jordan says that while filming, events were happening in the news that made them think audiences would assume Fahrenheit had been written in the past 12 months.

“It’s crazy how relevant the book is today,” he says.

I ask Jordan about the status of Creed 2, and he gives a big shrug of his shoulders.

“I don’t know,” he says. “We’re developing it. It’s one of those things—it’s always harder to make the sequel. We’ve got to make sure it’s done right and isn’t rushed.”

Jordan is not a headline chaser who cultivates a relationship with paparazzi; he’s never really had a turn on the gossip carousel; he’s semi-regular on social media at best. He keeps a low profile about his personal life, though he says he’s single. “Dating,” he says, “but technically single.

“L.A. isn’t the best place to date,” he says. “No offense to L.A.”

He still considers himself an East Coaster. He misses the energy of back home, the ability to walk out the door and let the day find you. Here in L.A. everything’s an appointment. And traffic. His parents moved out here and share his home (“My parents are my roommates,” he says), and he’s moving forward with plans for a restaurant downtown (“to have a spot to go to”), but his life here is very much about the work.

As for that other Jordan, the basketball one? Michael B. Jordan did meet him once, at an NBA All-Star Weekend a while back. Like everyone, he sounds a little awestruck: Michael Jordan! But as we get up to leave, Jordan admits he’s dreamed of meeting the basketball icon, metaphorically, eye to eye.

He may not be in that air yet. But Michael B. Jordan is rising.