Action Man

As a child Michael B. Jordan got teased a lot. It was the name. Michael Jordan. Who did he think he was, Michael Jordan? He played basketball in school, just like his namesake, the Chicago Bulls champion and sporting legend. However, kids can be cruel and relentless. At least they were in Jordan’s school, in middleclass Newark, New Jersey. It went on for years. He wanted to change his first name. His second name. Anything. Then one day, out of nowhere, he experienced a minor epiphany.

“I just thought, ‘You know what? I don’t want people to think of Michael Jordan when they hear my name. I want them to know me.’ ” Step forward, Michael B. Jordan (the B stands for Bakari — Swahili for “one with promise”, no less), the seemingly unstoppable 32-year-old screen star who brought the Rocky franchise roaring out of retirement with Creed, gave an award-worthy performance in the excoriating truelife drama Fruitvale Station and was by far the best thing in the Marvel mega-blockbuster Black Panther, as the fabulously monikered villain Erik Killmonger. Next he plays a Navy SEAL in Without Remorse, an action-packed film based on the Tom Clancy novel. As Killmonger, covered in hundreds of tiny ritualistic scars (one for every life taken) and pumped up to terrifying proportions (Jordan put on 20lb of muscle for the role — all heavy weights and boiled chicken), his big revelation scene sees him challenge T’Challa to the throne of the fictional African nation Wakanda. Pure Russell Crowe in Gladiator (“Father to a murdered child,” etc), he strips off in front of his nemesis and, his voice cracking with emotion, announces: “I’ve lived my whole life waiting for this moment!” Then he hammers T’Challa and chucks him off a cliff. When I mention the Crowe parallels, Jordan laughs. He says that he loves it and that the scene was powerful to perform, but that a lot of the praise has to go to his 31-year-old wunderkind director Ryan Coogler, who pored over the scene with Jordan for hours before they shot it. Jordan does this a lot, defers to Coogler, with whom he has made three movies (Fruitvale Station and Creed were both his). The pair are fast becoming the Scorsese-De Niro of our day, and Jordan waxes lyrical about their instinctive connection. “We have an unspoken language,” he says. “It’s looks, hand gestures, even different vocal variations on the same word. It makes shooting so much easier. It’s truly incredible.” In person, in jeans and sweatshirt, in a quiet London hotel suite, Jordan is unexpectedly soft and sincere. No irony. No smart-arse actorly games. Coogler has said of Jordan that he has a “natural charisma” that draws you in and makes him “incredibly relatable”. And certainly the appeal of his bigscreen protagonists so far is in their complexity and the hints of sadness beneath their frequently brash exteriors. He says “freakin’” too, where other actors would just swear, which is lovely. “I was surrounded by a lot of freakin’ good actors,” he says of his early days on TV, playing a teenage drug runner on The Wire. The reluctance to use the f-word is, I suspect, just manners. His father was in the US Marines. There was, he says, a lot of discipline growing up. A lot of family. A lot of values. Black Panther is the highest-grossing superhero film of all time.

This has not gone unnoticed by Jordan. He says that money will be the biggest driver of equality in the Hollywood of the future. “It’s not about, ‘Yes, I want to do this and make this change because it’s the way it should be.’ No, unfortunately that’s not the way it is. It’s because it’s a business, it makes money, and that’s the biggest thing.” Jordan’s story in the movie business begins in the foyer of a doctor’s office in Newark where the receptionist looked at the cute 12-year-old (he’s the middle of three children, with an elder sister and younger brother) and told his mother, a high-school guidance counsellor, that she should consider putting him forward for modelling work. She did, and almost immediately he nabbed an agent and a manager (who was then also the manager of Zoe Saldana from Avatar). Jordan did commercials and bit parts in TV (The Sopranos, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation). He enjoyed the money, and being treated as an adult on set, but never thought of himself as an actor. Then at the age of 14 came The Wire. He played a teenage dealer, Wallace. He was in the first season only, and shot dead at the end of that, but it changed everything. He was coached by the high-calibre actors around him (Idris Elba and Dominic West included), and says that it was the first time that he “lost” himself in a character. “It was a crazy feeling,” he says. “It felt weird. For the first time ever I felt not like myself. I didn’t know how to process it, but I knew that I loved it, and I needed to chase that feeling of true character.” As if. He worked steadily through the next decade in TV, playing a quarterback in Friday Night Lights and a recovering alcoholic in Parenthood, and being encouraged, he says, at all times by his ex-Marine father to prepare for the future, to focus and to take his work seriously. He met Coogler in 2012 at an audition for Fruitvale Station. “We just clicked,” he says. “We connected on every level, from family to cartoons to what cereal we like. I can’t explain it, but we’ve been in synch ever since.” In Fruitvale Station he played Oscar Grant, the real-life victim of a fatal police shooting in Oakland, California, in 2009. It’s an incendiary turn, veering from sweet and light to righteous ire, and it set him up nicely for Coogler’s next project, the Rocky reboot Creed.

Look, it’s every kid’s dream, to buy their mom and dad a house. It was a bucket-list thing for me

That one, in which he plays Adonis Creed, the long-lost son of Apollo Creed, made a ton of money ($175 million) and set Jordan up as a serious movie player. He relocated to Los Angeles and bought an impressive and sprawling pile in the Hollywood Hills (he allowed the cameras of Vogue magazine in— house envy ensues) where he lives with his, ahem, parents. He giggles at the mention of the subject. “Look, it’s every kid’s dream, to buy their mom and dad a house. It was a bucket-list thing for me.” But doesn’t it cramp your style, you know, romantically? “Who are you telling, man?” he says, nodding vigorously, eyes wide. “And they know that too, so it’s a balance, and about understanding where they are in their life and marriage. But you know, you have roommates, but they’re also your parents. And that’s a weird dynamic.” He was once rumoured to be dating the reality star Kendall Jenner, then it was a girl, a regular girl, whom he met on the beach on his new year break, but mention the subject and he laughs, points to my recorder and shakes his hands as if to say, no chance, not on the record at least.

Career wise, although there have been sizeable blips along the way (the 2015 Fantastic Four turkey and before that the 2012 flop Red Tails) they were all, he says, part of a master plan. “They’re all chess moves,” he says, tongue only slightly in cheek. “It’s about how do I get to a certain place? How do I build an audience overseas? How do I build an audience in China? Well Marvel does China, so I need to make sure I do one of them. That’s the way it is. I am always trying to find a way to reverse engineer where I want to go. And for me it’s Tom Cruise, Will Smith, Denzel Washington and Leonardo DiCaprio. I want to be a mixture.” And is he almost there? “Yeah, it’s happening. I’m getting everything I ever wanted. And now it’s just about keeping going.”

WORDS: KEVIN MAHER