The “stereotypical” role Michael B Jordan never wanted to play again: “It was a chess move”
The 2026 Oscar nominations felt like some of the freshest in years.
The biggest success story belonged to Sinners, a musical vampire horror movie with a strong focus on Black heritage that became the most-nominated movie in Academy history, and one of those nominations belonged to the film’s biggest star, Michael B Jordan, who was honoured for his dual role as Elijah ‘Smoke’ Moore/Elias ‘Stack’ Moore.
Jordan has had to wade through a lot of embarrassing muck to get to where he is today, grinding away on various low-level movies and TV shows to establish himself as a leading man, so while this is his first nomination, it’s been a long time coming, and it certainly won’t be his last.
Audiences of a certain age might remember him from his stint on the soap opera All My Children, airing from 1970 to 2011, a long-running serial that followed the lives of various residents of a Philadelphia suburb, where Jordan stuck around for three years, following his brief but memorable stint on The Wire as the tragic Wallace.
In an interview with GQ, the chiselled star cast his mind back to those early days, noting that while the series wasn’t what he wanted to do forever, he knew it was an important step in getting his career off the ground.
“I knew that it was a chess move,” he explained, “You work on a show like All My Children, we know what it is, but you’re still able to grow outside of it. It’s the perfect situation. I learned, I grew as an actor, I worked with professionals, I got paid.”
Jordan joined the show in 2003, playing the role of Reggie Montgomery, the adopted son of long-serving character and local lawyer Jackson Montgomery, played by Walt Willey. His storylines mostly revolved around his various criminal activities, with his adoptive father working to straighten him out, and he also enjoyed a brief romance with Joni Stafford, played by a young Amanda Seyfried. He was not the first actor to play the character, and fascinatingly, he replaced the original performer, his future Black Panther co-star and nemesis, Chadwick Boseman.
The reason Boseman left the show had nothing to do with his schedule or his success elsewhere, but because he was fired after just one week after he raised concerns about Reggie’s character. He claimed that the series was feeding into negative images about young Black men, something Jordan agreed with, continuing, “No dad, no mom, a fucking stereotypical Black role in a soap opera. I saw the stereotype, so moving forward I was like, ‘Nah, those are the roles I don’t want to play’.”
Despite the series taking some of the criticisms of Reggie on board, the character still contributed to a larger, negative narrative surrounding African-Americans on TV. The great irony is that both of the actors who played him would go on to become extremely positive role models for young Black men after they left the show, and as Jordan explained, All My Children was a necessary stepping stone to get to the roles he really wanted to play.
