From Thai beaches to Jersey prisons: the two performances that shaped Michael B Jordan
Plenty of rising stars have been dubbed the next big thing before fading away in obscurity and anonymity, but Michael B Jordan continues going from strength to strength.
While the one-two punch of Josh Trank’s found-footage superhero hit, Chronicle, and Ryan Coogler’s acclaimed Fruitvale Station put him on the map cinematically in 2012 and 2013, Jordan wasn’t a complete unknown without a body of work to back up the newfound hype that surrounded him.
He’d been a recurring fixture on The Wire, one of the greatest TV shows of all time, as Wallace, before gaining more reps on the soap opera All My Children, before finding his biggest small-screen breakout role to date as Vince Howard in Friday Night Lights, and his trajectory has continued trending upward.
Whether he’s playing the villain in Black Panther, one of the biggest box office hits of the century, inheriting the Rocky franchise from Sylvester Stallone for three critically and commercially successful spinoffs, which included making his directorial debut on Creed III, or anchoring Coogler’s record-breaking Sinners with an Academy Award-nominated dual performance, Jordan is still on the rise.
He always wanted to be an actor, but for someone who was born and raised in California, his primary influences were both a world away and worlds apart. When asked by Deadline if there were any performances etched in his mind as his most towering influences, he didn’t hesitate to name them.
“Two come to mind right away,” he said. “Denzel Washington in The Hurricane. And The Beach, with Leo DiCaprio. Those performances stuck out with me.” The former is understandable, since it was an Oscar-nominated tour de force about Rubin Carter’s fall from grace that saw him spend almost 20 years behind bars in a New Jersey prison for a crime he was ultimately acquitted of. The other? Not so much.
The Beach is arguably the worst film that DiCaprio has ever made, and in terms of both the best pictures he’s been in and the finest performances he’s given, it doesn’t come close to cracking the top ten on either front. And yet, for Jordan, it was inspirational, with several other titles sharing that distinction.
“Seven was a movie that really stuck with me, and Indiana Jones and the Batman films,” he explained. “James Bond. Big, big, big action and adventure and all those twists and turns.” However, it wasn’t all about pyrotechnics, with the star adding that Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet “changed my view of what was possible in cinema.”
He’ll be able to put those 007 and European influences to good use when his remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, which Jordan headlines, directed, and produces, is released, but it might be a wiser idea for him to search for a movie that’s got more in common with The Hurricane than The Beach, since DiCaprio’s misadventures in Thailand didn’t make for a very good film.
