EXCLUSIVE: Michael B. Jordan and Ryan Coogler kept intact their impeccable track record together as the elevated genre film Sinners outkicked the tracking coverage with a domestic gross of $48 million. It is a well timed hit for Warner Bros, on the heels of Minecraft. Starting with Fruitvale Station and continuing with Creed and the Black Panther blockbusters, these guys are on a track to be mentioned among the most enduring of director-actor partnerships. The one Martin Scorsese has with Robert De Niro & Leonardo DiCaprio, Denzel Washington had with Tony Scott and has now with Antoine Fuqua, and John Woo had with Chow Yun-Fat. They are just a bit better, when together. Jordan is prepping a summer shoot in the UK for his second outing as director/star with a remake of the 1968 Steve McQueen-Faye Dunaway heist film The Thomas Crown Affair. He’s also got his franchises, stretching his Without Remorse op soldier John Kelly in Rainbow Six with John Wick helmer Chad Stahelski, and expanding the Creed universe after scoring a hit in his directorial debut opposite Jonathan Major. He discusses here the ambition only works when each performance raises the bar on what came before.
DEADLINE: How has your relationship evolved with Ryan Coogler evolved since you too became a director prepping your second film? Do you lay your scripts and cuts of your films on each other as a sounding board?
MICHAEL B. JORDAN: That’s a good observation of our growth. He’s had such a serious impact on my trajectory, my growth as an actor, whatever I am in the industry. And with the growth of my own ambitions. Our dynamic has definitely grown over the years, since I made that jump behind the camera and even my desire is to expand the Creed universe, something that he created. So he’s a producer on those projects and my anime that I’m developing.
We have a working relationship outside of the things that are just him directing, me starring in, and also just you hit it right on the head as a sounding board. There’s a trust and taste and we workshop things. It is a brotherhood, a secret society of folks amongst directors that show each other their work and they get notes and thoughts and feedback, coming from an understanding of the process of creating something and being vulnerable and putting something out there and maybe him having a perspective that I wasn’t really looking at. So there is this dynamic between us; we definitely help each other out on things that we’re not directly involved in.
Me becoming a director, there’s ways that I can be useful to him on set or in empathy and a foresight and an understanding the things that he’s looking for. Or the next steps in the process as a director that I could possibly get ahead of for him to make his days a little bit easier, to achieve a scene a little bit more seamlessly. He calls it having a lead blocker. I can get out there and see things and stop things or help move things along before they even get to him. Those things are super helpful.
DEADLINE: It has to be twice as hard for an actor to play twins and create a distinctively different persona for each. Tom Hardy did it when he played the Kray Brothers and I was reminded of that watching Smoke and Stack in Sinners. Inseparable, but different in subtle ways, from the way they dealt with their PTSD, ambition and aggressiveness. Do you create a backstory for each, and what’s key in being to create believably different identical twin characters as you did?
JORDAN: Mike, man, it is really not one thing, and I didn’t really look at any other performances in doing this, though I’ve seen ’em in the past. This was a long-winding layered process. I got this unquenchable thirst to do well, to be honest, to service the story and the characters that Ryan created. There’s a dependability that comes with me when I sign on for something, especially when it comes with Coog and our relationship. So understanding where the story came from and what it meant, it really started with that exploration of figuring it out and the mental preparation. Alright, these are two different guys, but identical twins, so it is nuanced. The specificity is so unique to any other character dynamic that I think exists. Sibling is one thing. Fraternal twin is one thing. Identical twins, something totally different.
Being able to talk to other identical twins and get a baseline and see what was the common denominator in a lot of their dynamics growing up as kids was important. You have some thick as thieves, you have some that wanted to be different, that didn’t want to be a twin at one point of their childhood. Maybe they’re not as close as Smoke and Stack in their adult lives. Others still share the same email address or have the same cell phone or same bank account, and live in the same place. Finding out where Smoke and Stack fall into that was important to me. Ryan had these filmmaker friends, Logan and Noah Miller, identical twins I leaned on a bunch. I had the good fortune knowing a few set of twins like Jonathan and Josh Baker and the Lucas Brothers. I got to know them and they gave me stuff to pull from. Then working with my dialect coach Beth McGuire, we really we started to unearth and work through and develop the, like you said, PTSD, but more like childhood trauma these twins went through. Backstory is something that is always important to me. I write journals for all my characters. Writing journals for both Smoke and Stack was extremely important to me and valuable because they were pretty much at every event in their life, major event in their lives. Having two different perspectives of the same events is interesting, two people looking at the same thing, but seeing things differently and how they looked at ’em differently based on that childhood trauma, how they carried that pain with them, how they got over that trauma, how they compensated for the loss of their father. And what they had to survive in the Deep South and Jim Crow era, and going to war and then working with gangsters.
Surviving and getting all these tool sets when they come back home to try to get a piece for themselves. You build out that perspective and that manifests in the way that they walk, the way that the cadence in their speech, their mannerisms, how they rest their faces, where they put their hands. And those things were really, really important for me to dial in, and go from one perspective and mindset to the other. Down to Smoke being the older of the two, so he had to get his hands dirty a lot more. He’s a little bit more mature in some areas, more in the execution of things, whether it’s a plan or a person. Smoke hides his pain, smoke holds his trauma and the real loss that he carries with him throughout this movie. You see that, at the end. He’s tired, and he finally gets to rest at the end.
DEADLINE: What about Stack?
JORDAN: Stack is a little more charismatic. He smiles through his pain. If he’s hurting, he’s going to smile, laugh, make a joke to get through it. He’s just as vicious, but a little bit more of the distracting type. The other thing about twins is, usually one is really, really good at something and the other doesn’t have to be, if they’re with each other all the time. They can be great at something else.
DEADLINE: Two halves of a brain?
JORDAN: And they make a whole. We loved that idea and tried to establish that where we could. They hated being apart from each other. The twins didn’t like separating, so we wanted to show them separating in this movie for a minute. And the difference between the two, how the world reacts to them…their reputation and legend was loud and went far, but also how they assess situations and how they handle ’em is a bit different.
DEADLINE: Quentin Tarantino creates these characters and mythologies so rich they beg for sequels he never had time to make. He was going to revive Brad Pitt’s stuntman character from Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood. Quentin decided to do something else for his final film. Now David Fincher will direct Pitt for Netflix what I’ve heard is called The Continuing Adventures of Cliff Booth, where the stuntman becomes a Hollywood studio fixer. I’d be first in line if you and Coogler did a prequel and we saw Smoke and Stack’s origin stories that are in your notebooks. Their childhood experiences, WWI and becoming feared enforcers for Al Capone, all the while longing for the women each left behind before they return to Mississippi in 1932 hellbent on taking down the KKK. I don’t even need the vampires. That would be a helluva film. How about that?
JORDAN: Early in the count for that one, man, but it is a testament to the characters in the world Ryan created. The world that exists in the history of Black American culture and the deep south. When you watch good movies, you want to see where they’re going next, and curious what happened before. And we want to see how they got there. To me, what you said means we made something that will resonate with people, but it might be too early to get into all that. I know Ryan’s kicking his shoes off, maybe just for a second, before he jumps into the next big thing that he’s got cooking. This twin stuff, man, it was such a mountain to climb. For me, the technical aspect of shooting, this was pretty intense as well. And kudos to this credible cast.
DEADLINE: They had to keep it straight, whether it was Smoke or Stack, and your burden was eased by the love affair and shared loss that Smoke has with Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) and Stack had with Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), an interracial relationship that would have been impossible in ‘30s Mississippi. Each brings heat, sex appeal and sadness, in very different ways.
JORDAN: That was a big thing. Even coming to set before we even got into it, if I was Smoke, I was always by Wunmi, even between takes. I was rarely if at all by Haillee, unless I was Stack. I was way more talkative on set when I was Stack. I didn’t talk a lot when I was Smoke and the crew and cast came to understand that. I’d let the first AD or Coog know, so they understodd that when I’m Smoke, and I’m rocking the blues, I’m not going to be talkative and please don’t take it personally. I wanted to make sure to keep that chemistry and sense of family, because when we make movies, it’s got to be a family. Everybody’s got to be locked in. We got to be together. I found a balance to be able to have my process and protect it and be alone and not talk to, but then also chop it up and talk shit and keep everybody, the crew and the cast, engaged. And they knew what time it was.
DEADLINE: More an observation than a question. I appreciate how you and Ryan break off pieces of yourself and your roots. Black Panter was a superhero movie, but I teared up when you had your death scene and told T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) you did not want to be saved, you’d rather go the way of Africans who threw themselves off boats rather that be dehumanized and enslaved. Sinners is a vampire genre movie but the signs are even more palpable. It is an odd time now, but it feels so important for artists to remain tribal, introducing their roots into these films. Even the Irish guy got a moment to express how hard it was for that group of immigrants. I love that you guys do that.
JORDAN: It’s extremely important, just being honest of your history, and honoring all the cultures that gumbo down there, different cultures and everybody that bled and sacrificed and contributed to life and community to stamp their culture down there. And that great migration that we had to go through, looking for our path, our freedom, escaping the horrors that are down there of our circumstances, and trying to survive while we were there, and then coming back. And trying to make things better and continuing to do so from generation to generation. How can we pass on our stories? There’s so many themes and things that people can pull from this movie that rings of honesty and telling the truth.
DEADLINE: I remember when talking to you and Ryan about Creed, and he was scouting Philly gyms, and watching the specific footwork of the fighters. He called you and said, we’re not ready, you’ve got to come down here. He said you didn’t bat an eye and put six months into learning those moves. Is there a parallel on Sinners, beyond creating the twins?
JORDAN: I think we always want to raise the bar from one project to the next. And Coog wanted to challenge me again on this one and push me to another level. And me, and all the things that I wanted to deliver, to level up, wanting to evolve, to show my range, playing fully developed, grown men. Smoke and Stack know exactly who they are. They’re not changing, they’re through and through grown men. And that was the first time I got a chance to play a fully developed man. And so I took the opportunity to build them out that way and to go the extra mile, surround myself with the tools that I needed to prepare and stay in it.
Chadwick Boseman means a lot to us, and once Ryan challenged me by asking, what would Chad be doing right now? And shit, man, it broke us up, man. It broke us up, meaning emotionally. But he ain’t had to say nothing else after that. That was one of the buttons that he could push. And I felt [Chadwick] around me during this. My grandmother was around me during this. It’s crazy. What really resonated to me while we were doing this, I started flashing back to just childhood memories or just in general when I’m going to my grandmother’s house and looking at old photo albums with my mom. And my grandparents and my great grandparents and cousins and aunts and everything, from the thirties and the twenties and the forties. I realized when I looked at these photographs, I’ve only known them in my life as older people, as grandparents and great aunts and great uncles and great aunts and great great uncles. I was like, wait, they were my age when they were in these photos. They were trying to make it as entrepreneurs, they were dancing, having fun, laughing, partying, trying to make ends meet, they were struck, all the things. I was like, man, so this is a movie for them. I’m walking in their shoes right now and living what they went through. Pulling on them and trying to infuse that was really, really important.
We are in the deep south, shooting this in New Orleans, and you go through those cotton fields and those sugar cane fields, those flatlands as far as you can see. You can’t help but feel our past and history and who and how many lives were lost, how much blood was shed, how much trauma’s down there. And that seeped into everything, every frame, it seeped into everything. And that’s what you feel that’s up on 70 millimeter, 65 millimeter up on IMAX, up on that big screen with the music and the sound design. That’s what you feel. That’s what you hear what I’m saying? That blues music and yeah, that’s what we want to put out there for people to go feel and check out and vibe to and feel. You know what I’m saying? Yeah, man. Hell yeah.
DEADLINE: Hearing you say that reminded me of the first time we met at Cannes, where you and Ryan premiered Fruitvale Station. You’d walk down the Croisette and it would unnerve you a bit to hear someone yell out, ‘Where’s Wallace at,’ a reference to your early turn in The Wire. I am just thinking to myself, where’s Wallace? Well, he’s a grown man now.
JORDAN: Man. You remember that? That’s crazy, bro. You got a memory like an elephant, bro. That’s crazy. Well, I grew up. Finally, Wallace grew up.
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