AHero’s Legacy
Michael B Jordan is somewhere off the coast of Saint Barthélemy, sinking slowly into the depths of the Caribbean Sea while holding a lava stone steady above his head. When he hits the sandy bottom, he takes 20 steps, drops the rock, then rises back to the surface. This aquatic workout is an apt metaphor for how many of us have felt over the past 12 months: head underwater, weighed down by the heaviness of the times.
It’s early January, and the year is off to a grim start. COVID-19 has reached devastating new milestones, despite encouraging signs from the vaccine rollout, and the Trump era has ended with a cosplay coup attempt – a violent storming of the Capitol orchestrated by white nationalists that played out on social media – and a historic second impeachment for the president. This dizzying turn of events has made many of us feel as if we were sinking even deeper into the abyss. During all this madness, Jordan is in the Caribbean with his girlfriend, the model Lori Harvey – a rare getaway he was able to swing after spending a year sitting still.
When the world came to a halt last spring, so did Jordan. The wave of uncertainty that swept every industry upended Hollywood almost overnight. He was forced to think hard about which film projects he could still pursue – an enviable position to be in, granted, in the context of the notoriously fickle movie business. Even so, the 34-yearold had just hit a different kind of stride. After the one-two punch of the Creed franchise and Black Panther cemented his leading-man status, Jordan was laying the groundwork for the next phase of his career – one in which he wasn’t just a screen idol but also a Hollywood mogul, with a slew of films that he would star in, produce and, in the case of the third Creed film, direct. And then the virus came, and scuppered his plans.
“I had three films lined up [for 2020]… projects that I had been nurturing for a long time,” he explains. “I had tough choices to make on which projects had the most chance of actually getting green-lit, based upon the pandemic and where we could shoot. I was trying to get to a place where I could, in my mind, take a slight break. That break just got moved up a little bit.”
Flipping the Script
Given how fresh his Hollywood omnipresence is, it’s easy to overlook the reality that Michael Bakari Jordan has been orbiting our screens for a third of his life. More than 20 years after his first film role, Jordan is one of the biggest movie stars on the planet – carving a seat for himself at the proverbial table with his production company, Outlier Society, and his eye for projects that either capture the experiences of black men (such as
2019’s critically acclaimed Just Mercy) or expand the perception of the roles that black actors can take on (such as his new action thriller Without Remorse,
“I’ve been doing this for 20-plus years. Now, I’ve got the opportunity to lead by example”
in which he tackles a popular Tom Clancy character previously brought to the screen by white actors).
Jordan’s career also has a new gravity – a greater responsibility, perhaps, and a sense that the stakes are now higher. The same year that People crowned him “the Sexiest Man Alive”, he was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people for his work in pushing Hollywood towards greater racial diversity, both on-screen and behind the scenes. His glamour and success make it all too easy to forget that he is in uncharted waters: he is a young man navigating an industry where every choice for black creatives is dissected for its wider ramifications, and he’s stepping into a period in his life when he is fully aware of his purpose.
“[This past year] was just me really becoming a man,” he tells Men’s Health. “That’s such a clichéd, overused term, and it has a lot of baggage to it. But I think that when personal purpose and meaning align, it allows you to be a man. I’ve been doing this for 20-plus years. Now, I get the opportunity to lead by example.”
Born in Santa Ana, California, and raised in Newark, New Jersey, Jordan scored his first gig in 1999, as an unnamed bully with two lines in The Sopranos. But it’s likely that you first noticed him in The Wire, as a doe-eyed, teenage drug dealer whose heartbreaking end was one of the show’s pivotal moments. Jordan’s star slowly rose with roles in Red Tails and Chronicle, before a performance in the 2013 indie hit Fruitvale Station made people stand up and pay attention.
The film, which traced the last 24 hours in the life of Oscar Grant, an unarmed man killed by a police officer, arrived at the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement; it was the first collaboration between Jordan and the writer-director Ryan Coogler. Since then, they have reinvented the Rocky franchise by focusing it on the son of the African American boxer Apollo Creed, broken box-office records with the billion-dollar Marvel blockbuster Black Panther, and helped to usher in a new black cultural renaissance in popular entertainment.
“I’ve always been a person that tried to be present but also live in the future,” he says, when asked if he had spent much time reflecting on his career breakthroughs. “Usually, when you shoot projects and movies, after you finish, it’s done and over with. You kind of check out. Then you’re on to the next thing, and you don’t really talk about the past thing until you do a press tour, or something like that. You kind of let go of it as an artist when you give it to the world. It’s for everybody else now.
“But I do think about legacy a lot,” he continues. “What I leave behind is something that I think about a lot. This past year has brought a lot of that to the forefront of my brain. Everybody’s had their share of loss in one way or another. I lost a friend in Chadwick [Boseman, who played Black Panther and died of cancer last August]. There are a lot of things that I want to accomplish, and I know time is limited and life is short. I try to not take it for granted. It’s really made me focus on that.”
A Balancing Act
As with most interactions these days, Men’s Health first meets Jordan over Zoom. Though he has lived in Los Angeles for the past 15 years, he is calling from New York, his temporary home while he shoots the Denzel Washington directed Journal for Jordan – one of the few projects that he has been able to keep on the books amid the pandemic.
Jordan comes into frame wearing a classic, black V-neck that betrays
an enviably sculpted chest. Our conversation periodically alights upon the subject of the lost year that was 2020: Jordan is frustrated about having had to postpone a trip to Japan (he’s a huge anime fan), which has been a lifelong dream; meanwhile, as a result of the uncertainty of shooting during the pandemic, fans will have to wait longer for Creed III. But he insists that he would much rather think about the future than ruminate over his stalled plans. “You’ve got to try to find a silver lining,” he says, flashing a leading-man smile.
Aside from the chance to dedicate more time to his spirituality and family, the silver lining, for Jordan, has been the energy he has been able to dedicate to figuring out his purpose and, most importantly, securing his autonomy. Outlier Society, the production company that he launched in 2016, focuses on diverse storytelling and was among the first companies to adopt the inclusion-rider concept for all of its projects.
Jordan’s career strategy is a simple one. He pursues roles that might advance his profile, regardless of whether they were created with a black actor in mind. Since 2015’s Fantastic Four reboot, in which he played the Human Torch, Jordan has made a point of taking roles that aren’t solely reliant on his identity as a black man in America. It’s why he took on the challenge of a 2018 adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, and it’s also what appealed to him about signing on to remake The Thomas Crown Affair, in which he will star as Crown, a character previously portrayed by Steve McQueen and Pierce Brosnan.
“I’ve been playing chess in this industry for a long time, and people often don’t understand what that really means,” he says. “You’re in a profession where, sometimes, your success and your popularity go hand in hand.
When you’ve got to do things that are unpopular, you’ve got to move with your intuition, your gut and what you know is right for the long run – even though people may not understand it.”
His latest film, Stefano Sollima’s thriller Without Remorse (out now on Amazon Prime Video), is no exception to this line of thinking. Jordan stars as John Kelly, a US Navy SEAL who seeks vengeance against his wife’s murderers, only to uncover a grand conspiracy. The adaptation of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan spin-off had been in development hell since the early days of the Clinton administration, and the actors attached to the role ran the gamut of the white action superstars you would expect. Early into the film, there’s a scene in which Kelly laments serving a country that doesn’t love him back. It’s a line that Tom Hardy, or Matt Damon, or Tom Cruise wouldn’t have had to utter, and a subtle reminder that Jordan is always cognisant of his responsibility as a black man in Hollywood, even while delivering slick popcorn flicks.
“You take these roles that aren’t written specifically for [you] because they have a platform, and you inject yourself and your experience into the character. That’s the Trojan horse,” he says. “Until this past year or so, that was a lot harder to do. We’re in this moment in time where I think, now more than ever, places are looking for that, because if not, there are ramifications [and] criticism.
“In the conversations that we have behind closed doors in the development process… you have to impose your will, and you have to fight for ideas and thoughts, characters and decisions.
It’s a constant thing.”
So, how does he balance the roles that advance his box-office ambitions with those that he feels are crucial to advancing the cause of equity for black Americans? Not easily, he admits.
“Fruitvale Station set the tone of expectation. People really connect with
“There are a lot of things I want to accomplish. I know that time is limited and life is short”
characters, and if that’s one of their first major introductions, it’s an expectation to continue down that line. There weren’t a lot of leading men doing those types of movies at my age, and you’ve got to look at how to position yourself [where you’re not] boxed in, while being able to give yourself the biggest stage to do the things you want to do.” He pauses. “And then you’ve got to be happy and do the things that you want to do and you care about.”
The Long Game
The roles that now come Jordan’s way extend far beyond the stereotypes that have long limited the opportunities for black male actors to prove themselves – a variation of a troubled youth in search of redemption, for example.
Yet the cultural impact of Fruitvale Station led to offers that betrayed a different kind of typecasting. “I’ve passed on a lot, because I can’t play every black historical figure,” he says. “There are other amazing, talented actors out there... One of the reasons why [I started] the production company was to be able to open the doors for other people who haven’t had those shots, who maybe couldn’t see the pathway or the move to make in order to carve out their piece.”
Jordan’s considered approach to his career is mirrored by the thoughtful way in which he protects his personal life. A private man in the public eye, he is one of the few millennial stars who haven’t commodified their personality. But Jordan’s desire to cultivate an air of inaccessibility has unfairly contributed to the perception that he doesn’t want his fans to know him – a subject that often comes up in interviews.
When we meet, social media is buzzing over his romance with Lori Harvey. It’s the first time we have seen Jordan publicly in a relationship; after the couple officially acknowledged their relationship after months of ambiguity, commentators in the media and online pounced on the little they
knew. This sort of scrutiny, of course, arguably comes with the territory of fame in the 21st century. Jordan has only recently got better at dealing with perceptions of himself that he can’t control. That’s part of the reason we’ve seen him loosen up on Instagram, posting the occasional thirst trap and showing us more of his life off-camera. But his new confidence in controlling his image speaks of who Jordan is now: he is a man in his thirties who has come of age in public view.
“For all the success I’ve had, there are going to be negative reactions and opinions thrown at me. When you’re younger, you’re just frustrated, but when you start to realise that this is what it is, you start to understand,” he says. “I’m never going to make everybody happy. People are always going to have their opinions about me. People can make up something completely false that has no fucking substance or anything, and there are going to be 100,000 people who’ll believe it, and that’s going to be their opinion of me. I can’t do anything about that, and I’ve just got to accept that and keep moving in my purpose. People who know me know my heart. But people who know me for my work... they know what I allow them to know. The fact that I’ve been so closed off about parts of my life was a personal choice. But as I’ve gotten older and a little more mature and more comfortable in my own skin, I’ve become much less concerned about it.”
Jordan is playing the long game. He peppers our conversation with the words “purpose” and “legacy”, and he makes it clear that these are his priorities. For years, Jordan worked hard to be the next big thing: the next Will Smith, the next Leonardo DiCaprio. Now, he is Michael B Jordan, an A-list star in his own right. He put in the effort hoping to become the kind of actor a young black boy could look up to. Now, he wants his career to be a blueprint for those who come after him.
“Everything that I’ve been through, everything that I’ve been taught, all the successes that I’ve had, all the failures that I’ve had, all the wisdom that I was given – I’ve learned from people who have done it before me,” he says. “This past year was all of that coming to a boiling point, for me to break out into the guy that I am right now.”
And that guy is a man in control. “I’m playing to be autonomous,” Jordan says. “That’s liberation: you’re controlling your own destiny. It gives you the freedom to make an impact where you see fit. It’s, like, ‘Alright, I can do what I need to do, when I need to do it, and there’s no asking.’”
“I’m playing to be autonomous. That’s liberation: you’re controlling your own destiny”
“Without Remorse” is released on 30 April 2021 and available on Amazon Prime Video