For over a decade, Michael B. Jordan has been talking about taking a break. Back in 2015, he was a young man, 28, with lots of screen credits and one main goal: make the transition from working actor to working movie star. That year, Jordan starred in a little-loved superhero movie, Fantastic Four, and then a much-loved boxing movie, Creed, a sequel to the fifth sequel of Rocky, which became a franchise in its own right thanks in large part to Jordan’s performance. He said that he wanted to ride his hot streak as long as it lasted—long enough, he hoped, to make some money to take care of his parents and his siblings. “Once they’re good I can start living a little,” he said. “My mid-30s I can live a little.” By the time he starred in Just Mercy, a 2019 legal drama based on the life of a civil rights lawyer, he was 32, with a place on Hollywood’s A-list, and he was still thinking about his next phase. He told an interviewer that he would be “in work mode” for the next few years, after which he might slow down for a while.
It has been seven years since he made that prediction, and he is busier than ever. In Hollywood, there is one credential that even movie stars covet, and Jordan received it this past March, when he was named best actor at the Academy Awards, in recognition of his dual performances as a pair of enterprising brothers in Sinners. When I caught up with him a few months later, in London, the next 12 months were already spoken for. He was scrambling to finish his new film, a reimagination of The Thomas Crown Affair, for which he is doing triple duty as actor, producer, and director. In the fall he would be shooting what could be his next lucrative franchise, a reboot of Miami Vice costarring Austin Butler, and producing Delphi, a Creed series spin-off set in a boxing gym. All spring, he’ll be promoting Thomas Crown, and after that? “I’ll probably take the rest of next year off,” he told me. “That’s probably when I’m going to do more reflecting and processing of all of this. Because honestly, it’s been—I’ve been moving.”
One of Jordan’s great gifts as an actor is his seriousness: As a teenager, he played characters that seemed wise beyond their years, like Wallace in The Wire, a fledgling drug dealer who seemed to understand the tragic nature of the drug trade better than the older guys who were showing him the ropes. Jordan has occasionally poked fun at his own reputation for earnest confidence. A few years ago, when he was the host of Saturday Night Live, he said during his monologue, “Sometimes, I can take myself a little too seriously.” But in person, he can be surprisingly boyish. He is now 39, enthusiastic and absurdly fit—and, it seems, relatively unjaded. As a boy, he used to sneak into the basement of his church in Newark, New Jersey, to catch episodes of Dragon Ball Z on television, and he remains an anime obsessive, with some projects in early stages of development. “I might just quit it all and make anime the rest of my life,” he told me, maybe only half joking.
Jordan has spent much of the past year in London, where his home is a suitably grand hotel, and that’s where he could be found on a recent afternoon. He was dressed comfortably but meticulously in pleated Issey Miyake trousers, a Nepenthes London cardigan, and spotless high-top Chuck Taylors by Fear of God. He told me that his life in London was pretty circumscribed—he spends most days in the hotel suite that serves as his makeshift office, or on set, or traveling between the two. But he has been surprised to find that when you are an American abroad—especially a Black American, perhaps—locals often express concern. He said, “People are like, ‘Oh, you’re from America, are you okay?’ ” This probably reflects Europe’s view of American politics, but maybe it also reflects the fact that something about Jordan makes people want to root for him, even when he seems to be on top of the world.
