Michael B Jordan’s forgotten collaboration with Tony Bennett: “It was cool”
Now that he’s got his first Golden Globe nomination under his arm for the ridiculously entertaining vampire mash-up Sinners, you get the impression that Michael B Jordan is only going to get better and better from here.
Although he’s well established as a sizable name in Hollywood thanks to massive films like the Rocky spin-off Creed and Marvel’s Black Panther, his dual performance as twin brothers in Sinners, the film directed by his good friend and long-time collaborator Ryan Coogler, was on another level completely.
An Oscar nomination is likely to follow the Golden Globe nod, and in any other year you’d expect Jordan to be a shoo-in, but next March’s ceremony is going to be a bun-fight due to the work put in by Leonardo DiCaprio in One Battle After Another, Joel Edgerton in Train Dreams and Jesse Plemons in Bugonia.
Not that Jordan will likely put too much stock in whether or not he picks up a golden statuette, he is far too busy on upcoming projects, not just in his role as an actor but also continuing his work behind the camera as well. He directed the latest instalment in the Creed franchise and is beginning pre-production on a fourth, and will also star in and direct another remake of the classic Steve McQueen art heist The Thomas Crown Affair.
He’ll also be appearing in Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six, his second movie based on the action author’s work after 2021’s Without Remorse, and it was while promoting that movie that he spoke about moving from America’s East coast to the West, and specifically about his link to a singer with a famously great love for San Francisco, the late Tony Bennett. Jordan was a youngster when Bennett came to New York in 1998 to shoot the album cover for The Playground, a collection of children’s songs. The cover shows Bennett smiling in the foreground with a group of kids behind him playing, one of whom was Jordan.
The actor said, “I was 11 years old, so I didn’t know much about him. But I remember him being very nice. He signed autographs for everybody and everything. It was cool.” Despite hailing from New York City and working extensively in the clubs of Jordan’s native New Jersey back in the 1940s, Bennett’s most well-known song was ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco’, and he spent many years in Las Vegas.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he became globally successful and has since gone down as one of the finest jazz singers of all time, and after more than 50million albums sold, his final record was released in 2021, a collection of duets with Lady Gaga, and he died two years later at 96.
Jordan is well known for his love of music, something that is integral to Sinners especially, and has often uploaded clips of him singing along to R&B tunes to social media in addition to starring in music videos for artists like Swedish star Snoh Alegra, and for his performance in Without Remorse he would use several different songs to get himself hyped up for action, resulting in his curating a Spotify playlist for the movie.
Jordan has several other projects in development, including Methuselah, an action film directed by Danny Boyle about a 1000-year-old man with advanced fighting skills.
