Michael B. Jordan: People don’t want to see a billionaire ‘just doing sh-t for fun’

Michael B. Jordan covers the October issue of Vogue Magazine. This is not the first time American Vogue has put a Black man on its cover, but it still feels big. MBJ also mentioned, in the piece, that he had a Black stylist (Carlos Nazario) for the magazine shoot and the photographer is Latino (Luis Alberto Rodriguez). Michael is promoting The Thomas Crown Affair, which he directed and where he plays Thomas Crown. He’s booked and busy and has been for years now – he basically only took a few days off this year after he won the Best Actor Oscar, then it was back to work. This Vogue piece was light on actual quotes from MBJ, but they got all of his costars and directors to sing his praises, which was nice. Some highlights:

Busy bee: When I caught up with him a few months [after he won the Oscar], 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.”

He’s been living & working in London for a few years: 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.

His version of Thomas Crown is no mere playboy: “I don’t think a billionaire, or a millionaire, just doing sh-t for fun, right now, is something that people want to see,” he told me. Instead, he said, his Crown is a mission-driven protagonist: a guy with a reason to do whatever he does, though possibly not a good one.

Whether he would have been happy just being a working actor: “I don’t know. My competitiveness—I don’t know.” He talked about his years on television, and about the inspiration he drew from Denzel Washington, and eventually he landed upon an answer. Michael B. Jordan, character actor? “I don’t think so. Whatever I wanted to do in life, I wanted to be competitive at, and I wanted to be mentioned amongst the greats.”

His Oscar win: He ran through his thank-yous and tried to express the overwhelming sense of obligation he felt. “I know you guys want me to do well, and I want to do that, because you guys bet on me,” he said. “Imma keep stepping up, and Imma keep being the best version of myself I can be.” The next day, he told me, he got sick. “Like, you reached the finish line, and your body said, ‘Alright, I got you here, time to shut down for a second,’ ” he said. He had a bunch of old friends in town from New Jersey, which meant that he was surrounded by revelry that he couldn’t fully participate in. “They’re ordering food, talking, laughing about the night, telling stories, just reliving it all,” he remembers. Jordan, meanwhile, spent the next four days recuperating with the assistance of an intravenous drip.

[From Vogue]

Vogue mentions the controversy around this version of The Thomas Crown Affair, namely the fact that Taylor Russell was supposed to be his leading lady before she dropped out just days before filming. MBJ doesn’t want to talk about that, so it’s just said in passing that he replaced Taylor with a white-passing Latina actress. We’ll see if it comes up during promotion, and whether he’ll address it further. But I’m fine with this Vogue profile – it’s not a tell all and it doesn’t have to be. Treat MBJ like his white contemporaries, allow him the space to just have his own vibe and not talk about his personal life.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red. Cover courtesy of Vogue.