STAR DUO FIGHT FOR JUSTICE
Jordan and Foxx team up in gritty Death Row drama
ACTOR Michael B. Jordan soared to superstardom after playing the bad dude in the blockbuster Black Panther. Now he’s back on the big screen . . . but as the good guy.
Jordan, 32, portrays civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson in the gripping drama Just Mercy. Stevenson founded what became the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama.
Back in 1989, Stevenson’s mother didn’t want her son going South because she feared for his life. And he was indeed harassed daily by law enforcement. But he also saved 130 Death Row inmates from execution.
Someone has said they found Jordan’s portrait of Stevenson too saintly. But Stevenson does divine duty in the Deep South, and is the closest many African American prisoners have to a deity.
A TED Talk the lawyer gave in 2012 about the nature of his work, and the dark realms he has to traverse, has been viewed 6.25 million times on YouTube.
His memoir, upon which Just Mercy is based, was a bestseller in the U.S. I read it a few years ago and I’ve been following his good work ever since.
‘He’s thoughtful and reserved,’ Jordan said of Stevenson. ‘When you meet him, he throws a blanket of humility over you. He’s so humble that he makes you come to his level of understanding.’
Such a quality is vital in the South, where one wrong move or word if you’re stopped by police (yes, even now) could cost you your freedom, or your life.
‘If he was emotional or angry, often justifiably so in certain situations, he wouldn’t be able to get anything done,’ Jordan told me. The actor acquired the screen rights to Stevenson’s story four years ago and worked on the script over two years with director Destin Daniel Cretton and screenwriter Andrew Lanham.
They zeroed in on the case of Walter McMillian, who ran his own lumber business and was convicted in 1988 for the murder of a young white woman.
Six years later, Stevenson was able to prove without a doubt that McMillian was miles away when the killing occurred.
Jordan went after Jamie Foxx, who won an Oscar for his spot-on portrayal of Ray Charles, to play the innocent man.
Foxx’s performance is superb — though he wears a pretty bad wig in early scenes. Jordan gave a hearty laugh at that as Foxx protested: ‘That wig was necessary, man!’ Foxx said that initially, it was difficult for him to comprehend ‘ being on Death Row for something you did not do’.
The 52- year- old had many conversations with Stevenson about McMillian: and also met with his relatives.
Jordan won acclaim when he appeared in the first season of The Wire as teenage drug dealer Wallace. In real life, though, he couldn’t get arrested. The agency that now represents him wouldn’t take him on back then. These days, he’s one of their biggest clients; they’ve even helped him set up his own production company to develop film and TV projects.
He’s doing a third Apollo Creed movie, and he spent months in Berlin last year playing Tom Clancy’s rough hero John Clark in No Remorse.
Further down the line there are plans to remake the Steve McQueen heist film The Thomas Crown Affair. ‘We’re working on the script — it’s a way off,’ insisted Jordan, who says he has based his business model on how folk like Denzel Washington, Tom Cruise and Leonard Di Caprio have handled their careers.
‘I’ve seen so many artists creating companies. I’m building something as diverse and eclectic as my tastebuds — and I like a lot of different things. I started to build my own recipe, and it’s still evolving,’ he said, noting that creating his own studio in a few years is not out of the question.
HE WANTS to play a broad range of characters — though he’d prefer it if they are still alive at the end of the picture. ‘ My mother was traumatised watching her son die on screen,’ he admitted.
She was distraught when he was gunned down in 2013’s Fruitvale Station, directed by Ryan Coogler — his closest collaborator, who went on to work with him on the Creed films and Black Panther. Jordan’s character in the latter, Erik Killmonger, met with a sticky end, too — though Foxx teased that he might show up again in the sequel. ‘Did Erik really die in Black Panther?’ he pondered.
Well, Jordan has told me he likes characters ‘who survive to fight another day’.