Actor Michael B. Jordan says he went very far down the rabbit hole to portray the evil Black Panther villain Killmonger and stayed away from family and children, even feeling that he needed therapy to get over the character afterward.
Jordan insisted that Killmonger’s dark outlook took a toll on him and left him with great sadness in an interview published this week at Rolling Stone.
“Killmonger allowed me to access the pain. And the unapologetic frustration that I had,” Jordan said about the character’s feelings about black oppression. “But then, obviously, there’s a sadness that comes along with that. I dove into that for a lot longer than I ever had before. So coming out of that [role] it was hard to want love. Because during shooting I kept myself from family and children, and away from everything that Killmonger never had.”
Jordan has made similar comments about the character in the past. In 2019, he even told Oprah Winfrey that he needed therapy after the film.
“It was a little tough for me at first,” Jordan told Oprah. “Readjusting to people caring about me, getting that love that I shut out. I shut out love, I didn’t want love. I wanted to be in this lonely place as long as I could.”
“Your mind is so powerful,” Jordan exclaimed. “Your mind will get your body past a threshold that it would have given up on way before. Honestly, therapy, just talking to somebody just helped me out a lot. As a man you get a lot of slack for it. I don’t really subscribe to that. Everyone needs to unpack and talk.”
Jordan also noted that he was forced to lie to everyone about not being in the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever sequel because of Marvel’s contract demands. “When you’re dealing with Marvel and stuff like that, you know the routine. So you just gotta, you know, deny, deny, deny, deny, deny until the end of it, yeah,” he said.
Jordan has had other worries keeping him awake at night recently. In 2021 he fell on his sword and renamed his rum brand after woke activists attacked him for “cultural appropriation” for the original name’s links to Trinidad.
Jordan launched his J’Ouvert brand rum product in 2021, but quickly ran afoul of the woke left — angry that he had “appropriated” the name of an annual festival in Trinidad, especially since the actor has no heritage with the country. Eventually he apologized and claimed he would come up with a new name for the rum. It is unclear if this promise was ever fulfilled.
Jordan was also a vocal supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement and in 2020 demanded that Hollywood “divest from the police” and even ban use of current or past police officers as studio security guards. And in June of 2020, he joined a BLM rally in Los Angeles and scolded Hollywood for a lack of commitment to hire black actors.
Jordan is set to star in Creed III which is scheduled to be released on March 3.
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