“You ever been to Cluck-U Chicken?” asks Michael B. Jordan. He’s en route to Vanity Fair’s Hollywood Issue shoot in London, but he can’t help but salivate over his favorite wing spot when I mention I’m from South Orange, New Jersey—a stone’s throw from Newark, where Jordan grew up. “I haven’t been there in so long,” he says wistfully. “That’s my spot.”
Alluring as the shop’s spicy wings may be, Jordan is simply too in demand as one of Hollywood’s last true-blue, old-school leading men. As a young actor, he worked his way up the Hollywood ladder, delivering standout supporting performances on soaps like All My Children and prestige dramas like The Wire and Friday Night Lights. He officially entered the pantheon of movie stars with the 2013 drama Fruitvale Station, his first collaboration with Ryan Coogler—the Martin Scorsese to Jordan’s Robert De Niro. The two have since enjoyed one of Hollywood’s most powerful partnerships, working together on the Creed franchise, the Black Panther films, and, most recently, this spring’s surprise smash-banger vampire movie, Sinners.
Photographer Theo Wenner. Fashion Editor Tom Guinness.
Photographer Theo Wenner. Fashion Editor Tom Guinness.
“Coog,” as Jordan affectionately calls him, has “always been a trailblazer.” Sometimes, directors like to throw their weight around; not Coog. “We’re always in lockstep and understanding what the shared vision of success looks like,” says Jordan. But despite their record of critically acclaimed box office hits, “we’ve been underestimated,” he adds. “It’s always been an uphill battle to prove certain things—not that we ever tried to prove anything. We always wanted to focus on the work and let those things speak for themselves.”
While Jordan loves “being a vessel” for Coogler’s vision, he’s also picked up the directing bug himself since helming the third installment in the Creed franchise. This proved to be an asset on the set of Sinners, where Jordan, he says, got to be an “extra set of eyes” for Coogler. “today you have two directors on set that are problem-solving and being creative,” Jordan says. When challenged with differentiating the identical twins he portrayed onscreen—the taciturn Smoke and hustler Stack—Jordan came up with an idea: “I wore different-size shoes.” As Smoke, he’d wear the larger pair: “Smoke was really grounded and didn’t really move around too much.” Stack “was a little more adventurous and curious,” Jordan says. “He was always moving from one thing to the next—a little lighter on his feet.”
That attention to detail and willingness to go the extra mile have made Jordan one of the last remaining stars who can reliably open a film. Perhaps it also helps that he had the good luck—or misfortune, depending on your point of view—of establishing himself right before social media became a deciding factor for casting directors. “Man, I’m born in ’87,” he says with a weary laugh. “I’m this bridge between knowing what it was like without social media, but then also understanding the impact that it has today.” Jordan doesn’t have Snapchat or TikTok, striving to be present for his fans without constantly putting on a show for them. “That’s a balance I’m always trying to find—just trying to be genuinely me,” he says. “I’m not trying to act in all elements of my life. That’s the day job, you know?”
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