As his career shows, Michael B. Jordan has not been one to shy away from complex portrayals of black people. The actor, whose first major break was as Wallace on The Wire, has played Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old black man killed by a Bay Area Rapid Transit officer on New Yearβs Day, and Black Pantherβs primary villain, Erik Killmonger, a black man so obsessed with the promise and allure of Wakanda, heβs willing to killβand be killedβfor it.
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But at one point in his career, Jordan says, he deliberately sought roles written for white characters. In a conversation with Issa Rae for Varietyβs TV showΒ Actors on Actors, Jordan said that around the time he was working on Fruitvale Station, he told his agents to filter the roles they sent to him.
β[I told my agents] I donβt want to go out for any role thatβs written for African Americans in the breakdown,β Jordan told Rae, who nodded knowingly in response. βI want to only go for, like, [roles written for] white males. Thatβs it. Me playing that role is going to make it what it is. I donβt want any pre-bias on the character.β
Jordan added that writers βwrite what they know, what their encounters of us would be. And thatβs a slight bias.β
Itβs necessary to note Jordanβs framing: The way he words βtheir encounters of usβ while gesturing toward Rae suggests that the specific writers Jordan is referring to are nonblack, making the issue more about how black characters are written, rather than any reluctance to acknowledge his characterβs race.
βThatβs why Chronicle was such a big role for me,β he continued. In that 2012 film, Jordan plays the leadβa black teen who discovers that he has telekinetic powers. The role had been written with a white teen in mindβone with an Eastern European last name that had to be changed once Jordan landed the role. Several years later, Jordan would play Johnny Storm, another superhero character that had previously been written as white.
For her part, Rae discussed how films like Black Panther have encouraged her to try out for roles she had previously assumed she had no chance of getting.
The full exchange is scheduled to air in two episodes on Tuesday, June 19, and Thursday, June 21, on KOCE-TV and will be available to stream on pbssocal.org.
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