Michael B Jordan has always been a movie star. But it’s taken Hollywood years to notice

For the past 15 years, Hollywood largely hasn’t had a clue what to do with Michael B Jordan, but giving him a Best Actor Oscar isn’t a bad place to start.

The 39-year-old star of Sinners should be one of cinema’s biggest male leads, but to date, he’s had to forge his career in spite of a bizarre and widespread industry indifference. Until last night, Hollywood showed surprisingly little inclination to buy into his obvious movie-star magnetism – a heady blend of the athletic grace of Paul Newman and the moral gravitas of Sidney Poitier – even though it had made Jordan’s most recent film a $370m global hit.

He graciously glossed over this in his acceptance speech, telling the audience at the Dolby Theatre: “I know you guys want me to do well, and and I wanna do that because you guys bet on me. So thank you for keeping on betting on me.”

But he might as well have been directly addressing the viewers at home. An exit poll conducted during Sinners’ US opening weekend found that the most popular reason for seeing it – cited by 47 percent of its audience – was him. Yet the roles you know him for are the ones that he and his long-time collaborator, the director Ryan Coogler, were left to cook up for themselves.

Yes, he’s been acting since he was 12: he got into the business via child modelling, and at 15 won considerable acclaim for playing the young drug dealer Wallace in the first season of HBO’s The Wire. Stints on the soap opera All My Children and the high school American football drama Friday Night Lights followed – then in his 20s, a handful of major film roles. He was in the Second World War thriller Red Tails, about the Tuskegee Airmen, a cohort of African-American fighter pilots, a dire sex comedy called That Awkward Moment, plus both the ingenious found-footage superhero movie Chronicle and the dismal reboot of Fantastic Four.

But there was no noticeable industry effort to nudge him up the ladder towards more conventionally prestigious material: not even a musician biopic. By and large, the studios clearly didn’t see him as that sort of actor. That he was finally rewarded by the Academy for his work in a horror movie – a genre generally regarded as Oscar kryptonite – says it all.

In other words, he and Coogler built their own ladders and scaled the walls themselves. The characters they built together are the ones that best display Jordan’s charm and range – not least Sinners’ bootlegging twins, the taciturn Smoke and the gregarious Stack, who are so deftly differentiated by Jordan that it’s easy to forget they’re both being played by the same man.

In his and Coogler’s torn-from-the-headlines 2013 drama Fruitvale Station, he was also Oscar Grant, the young victim of a police shooting – and, in the mostly tremendous Creed trilogy, the ascendant boxer Adonis “Donnie” Johnson, the extramarital offspring of the late Apollo Creed, whom we last saw knocking lumps out of Sylvester Stallone in the Rocky films. (The second Creed was directed by Steven Caple Jr, and the thunderous third by Jordan himself.)

Between them, Jordan and Coogler also gave the Marvel franchise its most nuanced, even defensible villain in Black Panther’s Erik Killmonger – a former Navy Seal who was raised in Oakland, California, vengefully estranged from his Wakandan royal heritage.

Though the business has now clearly drawn Jordan to its bosom, it’s hard not to notice how hitherto reluctant it’s been to give him meaningful work. Even his forthcoming remake of The Thomas Crown Affair – which he’ll star in, produce and direct – is a personal project he’s been slogging away at since early 2016, when he first pitched it to MGM executives. He’s also due to star in Rainbow Six, a forthcoming adaptation of the Tom Clancy novel from John Wick director Chad Stahelski – though again, it’s being coaxed into existence by Jordan’s own production company.

So why has Jordan not been regularly mentioned in the same breath as Timothée Chalamet, Glen Powell and Austin Butler as one of Hollywood’s new generation of prospective saviours? The obvious answer – because he’s black – is an unfortunately plausible one, since he’s in a business that might love to lecture the rest of the world on diversity, but which remains cynically wary of its possible financial consequences. (Look at the side-lining of John Boyega in the Star Wars posters – worse, the side-lining of John Boyega full stop since 2019.)

But it might be in part because he tries to preserve a degree of movie-star mystique. Vast social media followings have become catnip for studio executives signing off on casting decisions. But Jordan’s official Instagram and Facebook accounts are little more than bulletin boards for the occasional posting of trailers, production stills and formal red carpet snaps.

“Why would they pay to see you on a weekend if they see you all week for free?” Denzel Washington reportedly once advised him. It’s a maxim he’s lived by since. His romantic life is largely a mystery: there was an 18-month relationship with the model Lori Harvey, and also an alleged flirtation around a decade ago with Casandra “Cassie” Ventura, the then-girlfriend of Sean Combs, AKA P Diddy, which allegedly led to the disgraced hip hop mogul threatening Jordan by phone.

There was also talk that his original Thomas Crown Affair co-star, Taylor Russell, may have left the project due to a fling that went sour. Meanwhile, one of the few confirmed personal details about him in wide circulation is his longstanding passion for anime, which bled into his surreally dynamic fight scenes with Majors in Creed III.

Will his Oscar finally persuade Hollywood that he’s worth their investment? Someone who’s never been in doubt of Jordan’s box-office value is Coogler, who told journalists on the film’s 2013 release that he’d always viewed his Fruitvale Station collaborator as a major leading man in the making.

When casting the role of Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old who was arbitrarily shot dead by transport police in the early hours of New Year’s Day 2009, Coogler was looking for someone with range and experience, plus a more-than-passing resemblance to his real-life counterpart – and, most of all, the sort of charisma that could make Grant a naturally warm, engaging figure without painting him simplistically as a martyr.

“In my mind, there was only one person who fit all of these requirements,” Coogler said at the time. He believed wholeheartedly that he had a star on his hands, but it’s taken his peers almost a decade and a half to realise he was right. Does that mean they’ll now act on it? Let’s see.

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