While an excited crowd of white, Black, old and young people lined up outside a movie theater on the Warner Bros. lot recently to see “Sinners,” Michael B. Jordan quietly slipped into a back room and posed for photographs. Dressed in an auburn zipper sweater, he said not a word, expertly tilting his head this way, that way, profile, straight-ahead. Then he walked upstairs to a conference room, sat at the end of a long table and explained how he reunited with Ryan Coogler to play charismatic twins in the writer-director’s blues-drenched vampire blockbuster.
Arms resting on the table, Jordan leaned in and told The Envelope, “I actually called Ryan to pitch him a project and he was [like], ‘That sounds great, how ’bout this one?’ Like, ‘I’ll raise you a pitch.’ Then he told me about ‘Sinners.’ It sounded fantastic, but he left out the vampires at first and left out the identical twins, and just kind of dropped those things along the way. I was like, ‘You want me to play identical twins? You could have led with that!’ But I’m a self-motivator. You give me a mission, give me a goal and I’m going to reach it.”
Jordan’s determination to deliver the goods for Coogler took root at a Starbucks on Ventura Boulevard 13 years ago. Coogler, a preternaturally confident USC film student, wrote “Fruitvale Station” — based on the 2009 killing of 22-year-old Oscar Grant by Bay Area Rapid Transit police — expressly for Jordan, even though they’d never met. “We hit it off big time right out the gate, talking about cartoons, sports,” Jordan recalled. “We both had something to prove.”
Coogler and Jordan did in fact prove their worth with “Fruitvale Station,” which won the Sundance Film Festival grand jury prize and audience award upon its premiere in 2013. Jordan then bulked up to star in the Coogler-directed boxing movie “Creed,” followed by Marvel blockbuster “Black Panther,” in which he played the title hero’s would-be usurper, Killmonger. “I isolated myself to put myself through what Killmonger had, or didn’t have, growing up,” Jordan noted quietly. After filming, he went into therapy. “I felt particularly heavy,” said Jordan, who’d been acting almost nonstop since he portrayed doomed drug dealer Wallace on “The Wire” as a teenager. “I’m blessed to have a career, but it’s an unpredictable road. Sticking to the work has kept me focused, kept me honest.”
In between Coogler projects, Jordan starred in “Just Mercy” as real-life death row attorney Bryan Stevenson and directed “Creed III,” reprising his role as Adonis “Donnie” Creed. Then, when identical brothers Smoke and Stack came calling, Jordan rented a house in Ojai and began excavating the twins’ backstories with help from longtime dialect coach Beth McGuire. “I locked myself away and we did some chakra work and explored how childhood trauma manifested itself physically with these guys — the way they speak, the cadence, how they rest. I started to feel subtle differences as I shifted between Smoke and Stack. It’s crazy because sometimes I’d look in the mirror and say, ‘Wow, I don’t see myself at all.’ That’s when you know you’re moving in the right direction.”
Once production began in Louisiana in the spring of 2024, Jordan relied on Oscar-winning costume designer Ruth E. Carter to delineate the twins from the outside in. Jordan said, “Smoke’s closed off and guarded, he’s planted, so let’s give him a size-too-big shoe because I wanted him to move slow and methodical. With Stack, we did a half-size too small to feel like he couldn’t sit still because that’s how he coped with his trauma — through his slick talk and smiling and laughing and going from one thing to the next because he wanted to f— move on from the pain like it didn’t happen.”
Coogler surrounded Jordan with stellar castmates including Wunmi Mosaku, Hailee Steinfeld, Jack O’Connell, Delroy Lindo and breakout star Miles Caton, whose blues singer Sammie headlines the new juke joint run by Smoke and Stack. In scenes that required Smoke and Stack to appear in the same frame, filmmakers encircled Jordan’s head with a shoulder-mounted “halo rig” affixed with 10 small cameras. “I’d play one character and then change [clothes] and play the other twin,” Jordan said. “I nerd out on the technical aspects because, to me, it’s fun. Now, you throw blood in there, you throw in 16-hour days and all that stuff, things might get a little crazy. But other than that, it was awesome.”
After “Sinners” wrapped, Jordan spent 10 months in England to direct, produce and star in a new version of “The Thomas Crown Affair.” Recently returned from the U.K., he’s had time to reflect on “Sinners.” “The film speaks to the Black experience in America within these borders of 1930s Jim Crow South,” Coogler mused. “My mom’s family came from Hope, Ark., and my dad’s side comes from Shreveport, La. You know your grandparents as old people but forget that they were 25 once, you forget that they were ambitious and entrepreneurs and had some fun drinking and smoking or whatever it was, trying to find a little relief, you know, from whatever their harsh reality was at the time. So for me, ‘Sinners’ ended up being a love letter to my grandparents and great-grandparents. I wanted to honor the life they were trying to live during that time.”
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