The 26-year-old actor looks back on the chance encounter that launched his career and the jobs that led him to a life-changing role in Fruitvale Station .
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Even though he'd already been working for a few hours on this particularly early and chilly December morning in New York City, Michael B. Jordan was brimming with energy and there was a shine to his inimitable smile. The newly minted star was home on the East Coast, back where it all started for him and where so much that matters still remains.
The Newark, N.J., native had flown in from L.A. a few days earlier to celebrate Thanksgiving and, more importantly, his mom's birthday. Jordan's been experiencing a breakthrough year as the star of Fruitvale Station, but he laughed at the suggestion that he's become a new hometown hero. "I thought that was Cory Booker," he joked. Still, just a night earlier, he sat in the celebrity row while taking in a New York Knicks game at Madison Square Garden, earning the sort of attention he could have only dreamed of when he was a preteen looking for open casting calls in Backstage magazine (which he's now appeared on the cover of) at Penn Station, just a few floors below the court. At 26, Jordan is both a seasoned veteran and a rising star, a self-made success whose magnetism got him noticed, but whose hustle cemented his career.
It all began in the early '90s at a doctor's office, of all places, where Jordan was sitting in the waiting room with his mother; when they got up to leave, the receptionist flagged them down and advised, unsolicited, him to give modeling a whirl. "I was a weird-looking kid, so it was kind of like, Ahh, whatever. I guess I'll try," he remembered, laughing while stretched out across a booth at a Midtown pub. The receptionist, it turned out, was also the mother of two children who'd done local advertisements already, so Jordan took time out of his busy schedule (tap dancing, soccer, amateur culinary pursuits) to head to some auditions.
And he booked the jobs, which kicked off a lucrative period of immortalizing his awkward pubescent years in ads for Toys "R" Us and other national brands, photos at which Jordan still blanches, thanks to his hair.
"Everybody had dreadlocks in Newark, and it started with braids, so I was like, OK, I wanna grow my hair out," he explained, shaking his now neatly cropped head. "So there's this stage where you go from this to this weird fro ... Those modeling pictures were not kind."
Of course, very few people look back on those years of their lives with anything but a cringe, and Jordan's sighing laugh acknowledges that, as far as awkward middle school phases go, his was pretty painless. Casting directors can back him up on that; at 12 years old, Jordan was given his first big TV roles: guest spots on HBO's landmark Jersey drama, The Sopranos, and on Bill Cosby's eponymous CBS sitcom, which coincidentally also starred his future Friday Night Lights co-star Jurnee Smollett. Those 1999 gigs led to a part in the 2001 Keanu Reeves-as-urban-Little-League-coach movie Hard Ball, and then came the real springboard: the role of Wallace, the young drug dealer on HBO's critical hit The Wire in 2002.
That 13-episode stint was followed by one of the most formative experiences of Jordan's career — leaving school early to get on the PATH train from Newark to midtown Manhattan to play Erica Kane's (Susan Lucci) adopted son Reggie on All My Children from 2003–2006.
Though his classmates would poke fun at his role in the show — and his cult-famous TV mom — the bustle of the daytime drama lifestyle provided a real education for the burgeoning actor.
"I learned so much on that show. My work ethic, I got so much from that — that pace of being on a soap opera, doing 100-plus pages a day, watching Susan Lucci day in and day out," Jordan said. "She's such a hard worker, and I learned so much from her. Yeah, soap operas. I don't know where I would be without it."
The paycheck didn't hurt, either. And instead of splashing the cash that came with a national TV gig on parties and other teen-star traps, Jordan decided to invest in an apartment complex in his hometown.
"Me and my dad, we saw it as an investment, and it was a great idea in theory. And then, of course, there were the struggles of a first-time investment," he explained, ruing what became a sunk cost. "Our broker definitely screwed us over 100%. We ended up having to foreclose on it. It ended up being a hassle. It ended up draining me, just draining me at a young age."
"It's so crazy because I remember when Sirius Radio was at $3.10 a share, and I had an option, either to go into stock or to go into real estate, and in my head it was like, Hey, God's not making any more land. I might as well go in on something that's right here instead of playing the whole stock market thing," Jordan added, now able to laugh at his early entrepreneurial decision-making. "I should have gone with Sirius."
Luckily, the real estate setback didn't do anything to alter the rising star's trajectory. He just kept his head down and continued to shuttle between school and his second home on the set of All My Children.
After 52 episodes of the soap, Jordan graduated and was released from his contract in 2006 — not enough screen time — and headed west to L.A., an experience he equates to a college education, living on "a 7-Eleven diet" and hustling for gigs, "going broke until you get a job, and hopefully, you're not losing yourself and your integrity and you're doing projects you really care about, not just working just to work."
Jordan with Kyle Chandler on Friday Night Lights
NBC
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