“It was pretty distracting”: the scene Michael B Jordan kicked his mother off the set to shoot
Never working with children or animals is one of the better-known pieces of advice in the entertainment world, but you could probably add mums to that list as well, as this year’s ‘Best Actor’ Oscar winner Michael B Jordan will tell you.
To say that Jordan is hot stuff at the moment would be like saying Percy Pigs are quite nice or that it rains a bit in Manchester; he’s become probably the first name on any casting director’s list for a Hollywood blockbuster thanks to his partnership with lifelong buddy Ryan Coogler that produced Creed, Black Panther and last year’s Sinners, and that shows no signs of stopping any time soon.
He may have wanted Jonathan Majors to be the Al Pacino to his Robert De Niro, which hasn’t gone according to plan for obvious reasons, but Jordan has at least found his Martin Scorsese. Jordan and Coogler’s partnership already goes back some 13 years now, to Fruitvale Station in fact, the searing tale of a young black man murdered by transport police that Coogler made on a budget of less than $1m as a first-time director.
That film showed what huge talents Coogler and Jordan were, and in the lead role, the latter showed hints of the career he would go on to have. But he had actually flown under the radar somewhat for some time before then, appearing in a succession of TV shows, including The Sopranos, the long-running soap All My Children, and in 2002, a season of David Simon’s ground-breaking, Baltimore-set drama The Wire.
Jordan was in the show’s first season as Wallace, a teenage drug dealer who runs the full gamut of life in the projects, trying to escape dealing before turning informant and finally being killed because of it. The tragic end that his character came to proved to be a difficult one for Jordan, who was still just 15 years old at the time. But he learned the fickle nature of how quickly a character can be disposed of on a series like that one.
He told Vanity Fair: “One of the things on The Wire is that nobody was safe, everybody can go… David Simon knocked on the trailer door and said ‘Look, Mike, we love you, everybody loves you, but that’s exactly why we have to kill you, and Wallace has to go.’”
Unfortunately for Jordan, his final scene coincided with most of his close family being on set, including his mother, who did not take well to seeing her son fictionally disposed of. “The death scene, everybody was very emotional, I remember mom being on set, she’s in video village, and you could just hear her sobbing and crying and stuff like that, it was pretty distracting,” he admitted. “I was like, ‘Please, Ma’, and ‘Somebody please just take her off set’.”
Despite that, Jordan still looked back at his time on The Wire with fond memories, and he spent most of the next decade learning his trade on several network TV shows before making his major movie breakthrough with the World War II film Red Tails and the sci-fi adventure Chronicle in 2012.
Jordan’s first post-‘Best Actor’ movie will be his reboot of the Thomas Crown Affair, the art heist comedy that has already been made twice by Steve McQueen and Pierce Brosnan, except he’s going one better than them by directing as well. It’s unlikely to be a sad movie, so his old dear can turn up on set if she wants.
