Michael B. Jordan Will Be King
By 14, Jordan had landed on The Wire, playing Wallace, a baby-faced drug dealer with cornrows and a heart so good that David Simon, the show's creator, knew killing him off would be the most emotional gut punch the series could deliver in its first season. “Everybody liked me too much,” Jordan recalls with a cocky smile. Nobody expected the death, and everyone was destroyed, Jordan remembers: the cast, the crew, the audience. Devastating, yes, but actually a fairly good indication of how he's become a film star. He was so likable, he had to get a bullet in the chest. And in the roles he took next—Vince Howard on Friday Night Lights; Alex, a love interest with a heartbreaking backstory, on Parenthood; Oscar Grant, an innocent Oakland man gunned down in an act of police brutality, in Fruitvale Station; even a blind patient with a mysterious illness on a single episode of House—Jordan showed a talent for worming his way into hearts and building a little nest there so that viewers couldn't bear to watch him die or suffer the tiniest bit. That remains a superpower of his, he suggests, “just making people feel.”
These days, Jordan is in the DiCaprio-ian position to make choices about roles—specifically the ability to turn things down. He and his agent, Phillip Sun, say they now take a color-blind approach to choosing Jordan's projects, which may sound like a naive post-racial platitude, but they've been using it to underwrite a smart business plan for Michael, Inc. “Obviously, there are certain roles in film and television that are specifically African-American, usually period pieces,” Sun tells me. “But why, if he were just an actor, why would he be limited to only those roles? He was like, ‘Why should other people be held back like that? Why shouldn't stories from different points of view be told more frequently? What is holding people back from doing that?’ And at the end of the day, we all know in Hollywood: It's star power. If you have the star that wants to lead the way in that way, they're going to do it.”
“Let it rise, girl, let it rise,” he says generously, then is instantly serious again. “So then they're going to talk about you, they're going to find out who you are. They're gonna find out what your Instagram is, they're going to find us in that. And all the fan club and everybody else is going to find out who you are, and now you and I are forever associated with one another. So now, how do you go anywhere normal, chill, just getting to know somebody that you just met, that you may not—may or may not—hit it off at all? That part of dating is tough.”
Either way, the response over the summer upset Jordan, and as we talk about it now, it upsets him again: “Did you know whose boat it was? No. Was it a yacht? Nah. If you knew what a yacht was, you'd know that wasn't a yacht. It's a boat. It's a boat. Have you ever been to Italy before? Do you know how that works? Sometimes you get on a boat, you go and meet people you've never met before, enjoy some stuff. It's vacation, it's life. Then it just turned into this whole other thing that it wasn't. It just wasn't that. I felt like I needed to say something in that moment.”
