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There are some things, Michael B. Jordan tells me, that you can never un-see. As a professional actor since he was a teenager, he has presumably seen a lot — including the fictional world of Wakanda in two Black Panther movies and several blows to the face in the three Creed films. But what he’s talking about here is the other side of the camera. Jordan made his directorial debut with Creed III, and he recently wrapped his remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, in which he also stars. As a result, he’s learned a lot about directing over the years — and to make Sinners, he had to forget it all.
Or, at least, he had to try.
“You pretend that you’re turning that part of your brain off,” Jordan, 38, tells me on today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, discussing his fifth film with director Ryan Coogler. “I’m a pretty empathetic person, I like to think. So, understanding what Ryan has to go through as a director daily, certain parts of my brain will always be, ‘All right, how can I problem solve and make this a bit smoother? How do we accomplish what we’re trying to accomplish right now?’”
Jordan and Coogler’s years of collaboration, which began on 2013’s Fruitvale Station and continued through Creed, two Black Panther films and now Sinners, means the star is likely to understand his director better than anyone else on set. But to play the dual role of twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, in Sinners, a vampire thriller set in the 1930s, Jordan says he had to be “selfish in the best way possible.” He continues, “I could just be singularly focused on the complexities and the nuances of Smoke and Stack — which I had more than my hands full in doing so.”
His dual performance in Sinners is a technical marvel but also a feat of acting, building the twins as distinct personalities and toggling between them each day on set. As he explains in our conversation, doing extensive prep work as both characters allowed him to operate on “pure muscle memory” on the day, and even sometimes improvise — though he’d then have to go back and shoot the same scene all over again to be the other character. Jordan calls it a “unique approach,” an understatement if I ever heard one.
Get much more from Jordan on today’s episode of the podcast, which starts with a conversation I had with Christopher Rosen about Sunday night’s Critics Choice Awards and the busy week of awards news ahead. We’ll be going live on Substack on Sunday night to watch the Golden Globes together — become a Prestige Junkie After Party subscriber and join us there!
