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Michael B. Jordan’s Biggest Fight Is With Himself
The actor-director has a firm spot on top of Hollywood’s A-list. So why does he still think he’s got so much to prove?
BY CARVELL WALLACE-Adrienne Raquel for Rolling Stone
IT IS A MILD SATURDAY in December, and I am in a nondescript office building in Burbank, California, watching three hand-selected scenes from the upcoming film Creed III. The movie, due out March 3, is very much unfinished. The director, who also happens to be the star, is not in the room, but is on the screen in front of me, dapper in a camel trench and high-end hoodie, on his face the trademark look of his that has made the actor both famous and irresistible: a look that combines mournfulness and defiance in exactly equal measure.
The character is the boxer Adonis Creed, an illegitimate son of Rocky Balboa’s rival turned friend Apollo Creed, and the actor/director/picker-of-scenes is Michael B. Jordan. This marks the directorial debut of a man who has been on movie and television sets since he was 12 years old when Bill Clinton was still president and the closest thing to social media was Classmates.com. I assume he’s excited to finally be helming something, after starring in nearly 20 films and appearing in countless TV shows over his 24-year career, but I won’t know for sure how he feels about it until I talk to him later.
In the scene I am watching, Adonis sits in a diner across from an old friend, Damian, played with an unsteady and lugubrious menace by Jonathan Majors. Like Jordan, Adonis is an A-lister in his field, known the world over, top of his game. He now owns a boxing gym, runs a stable of fighters, and retires at night to a sprawling, modernist mansion where his famous music-producer wife and lovely young daughter await him.
Damian has had a different experience. He and Adonis were in group homes together as children, ran the streets as teens, and committed petty crimes. But that lifestyle only caught up with one of them. Damian ended up in prison for more than a decade serving time for an incident Adonis escaped while he watched his childhood friend become a star.
The men are having, with spare dialogue and long looks, what amounts to a very silent heavyweight fight. Adonis wants to be available to Damian, who is fresh out of prison and wants to offer him a hand. But he is clearly uncomfortable, perhaps even a little ashamed of his exorbitant success, now that he sees it placed against the rugged, earthy reality of his past, represented by Damian, dressed in wrinkled denim and a dirty beanie, hauling all of his possessions in a single bag.
“Listen, man, if you need anything,” Adonis offers, establishing himself as charitable and understanding.
“Naw, man, I’m straight,” Damian tersely counters.
Adonis sees that he has made a misstep. He has led with his chin. Guilt has thrown him off balance. He tries to recover.
“Oh, I didn’t mean it like that.…”
“It’s cool.…” Damian says, sensing apprehension and getting ready to move in.
In this scene Jordan has picked for me to watch, Creed, who has overcome everything, and quite literally fought his way from being an abandoned child in a youth lockup facility to the people’s hero at the very top of his profession, finds himself across the table from the one thing he still fears: someone who has good reason to believe he might not deserve it.
SEVERAL HOURS LATER, it is me across from Michael B. Jordan at a restaurant in the Burbank Hills, and he can’t decide what to eat. He’s thinking about the French toast because, in his words, “I’m cheating.” He utters this with a hint of mischief in his voice, in a way that makes it easy for me to imagine him as an eight-year-old. There is something about him, a certain around-the-way-ness, that perpetually reminds you of someone’s impish kid brother who’s now all grown up.
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