Highlights
- Michael B. Jordan began his acting career in 1999, with small appearances in Cosby and The Sopranos, before his first film role in Hardball.
- As a teenager, Michael B. Jordan played the character Reggie on the soap opera All My Children from 2003 to 2006, as he recalled during his SNL monologue.
- The late Chadwick Boseman originally played the role of Reggie on All My Children for one week before Jordan took over, with Boseman’s raising concerns about racial stereotypes in the character’s writing.
Although he’s best known for his huge blockbusters like Black Panther and Creed, Michael B. Jordan’s acting career actually began decades ago and included a pretty big part on a popular soap opera.
Jordan started his career as a professional actor in 1999, when he briefly appeared in an episode of Cosby and The Sopranos. His first film role came in 2001, when he appeared alongside Keanu Reeves in Hardball.
One of Michael B. Jordan’s earliest regular roles, though, was appearing in a long-running soap opera. Jordan mentioned the role in his opening monologue of Saturday Night Live. During the NBC show, he revealed he played Reggie on All My Children between 2003 and 2006.
Michael B. Jordan’s Soap Opera Past
All My Children held an impressive spot on ABC’s daytime lineup for 41 years before coming to an end in 2011. Michael B. Jordan joined the cast of ABC‘s All My Children in 2003 as Reggie Porter Montgomery and stayed on the popular soap opera for 59 episodes before his character left town.
During Michael B. Jordan’s SNL monologue, he shared, “Yesterday, I had a crazy full-circle moment. We pre-shot some videos for the show, and when I got to the studio I realized it was the exact same place where I shot one of my first acting roles on the soap opera All My Children.”
The show then played a clip of 16-year-old Michael B. Jordan as his All My Children character Reggie, says, “Sometimes the animal in me gets kind of crazy” and then howls life a wolf at the end of the scene. Adult Jordan mockingly addressed the clip, “I’m pretty sure I hit puberty mid-howl.”
Michael B. Jordan ended his monologue by looping it back to his early acting days on All My Children, sharing, “I just want to say, I’m so grateful to be standing on this stage. Sometimes, I can take myself a little too seriously but tonight, I’m going to have fun, I’m just going to go for it. And maybe, just maybe let the inner animal get a little crazy.”
Michael B. Jordan’s All My Children Role First Belonged To A Different Marvel Actor
Michael B Jordan actually wasn’t the first choice for the role of Reggie in All My Children. Another famous Marvel actor played the character before Jordan stepped in.
Chadwick Boseman played the All My Children role for one week before Michael B. Jordan took over the role. Boseman later admitted that he wasn’t sure the role was right for him and felt it wasn’t “part of what I want to do.”
“Because with a soap opera, you don’t know the full scope of what’s gonna happen — you don’t know where they’re gonna take the character, because they don’t always know where the character is going. And because of that, there’s possibly room for me to adjust this and change it and make it so it’s stereotypical on the page but not on the screen.”
Boseman also had issues with the way Reggie Porter was written using racial stereotypes. In the All My Children storyline, Reggie was a young gang member who was adopted by Erica Kane (Susan Lucci) and her husband, Jackson Montgomery (Walt Willey). The choice to walk away from the show was not an easier one for Boseman, who had very minimal acting credit to his name at the time.
“I remember going home and thinking, ‘Do I say something to them about this? Do I just do it?’ And I couldn’t just do it,” the late Black Panther star explained. “I had to voice my opinions and put my stamp on it. And the good thing about it was, it changed it a little bit for [Jordan]. They said, ‘You are too much trouble,’ but they took my suggestions, or some of them. And for me, honestly, that’s what this is about.”
Michael B. Jordan had no idea Chadwick Boseman played the role before him until it was brought up in an interview with The Wrap, many years later. “We ain’t never talked about this before a day in our lives — to understand how what people do now can directly affect what other people do in the future,” Jordan said.
“And the work that we’re doing on Black Panther is hopefully doing the same thing for the next group of actors that are coming up, just like our predecessors opened up doors and made things easier for us.”
Another One Of Michael B. Jordan’s First Big Roles Was On HBO’s The Wire
Another one of Michael B. Jordan’s key roles as a young actor was playing Wallace in season 1 of The Wire. Showrunner David Simon described Michael B. Jordan’s The Wire character as the “emotional center” of the first season.
Jordan’s Wallace was one of Avon Barksdale’s crew’s youngest and more innocent members. Despite being involved in illegal activity, he still had lots of childlike interests, which makes his downfall even more heartbreaking. Even the showrunner was devastated for killing off Michael B. Jordan’s character in season one.
When David Simon knocked on the actor’s door to break the news about his role on the show, he told him, “Look, Mike, we love you, everybody loves you, but that’s exactly why we have to kill you.”
Wallace’s death scene on The Wire was so emotional that even Michael B. Jordan’s own mother struggled to be on set during filming. “I remember my mom being on set, she’s in Video Village and you could just hear her sobbing and crying and stuff like that. It was pretty distracting. I’m like, ‘Ma … Somebody, please just take her off set.’ But it was a good time, looking back at it.”
Fans Might Not Remember Michael B. Jordan’s Small Part On The Sopranos
Michael B. Jordan worked hard to go from a child TV actor to a celebrated actor, director, and businessman. “When you come from where I come from, and everybody doesn’t get those opportunities and breaks — that luck or whatever — you start to question why you’re getting the things that you get. Why am I successful in life? Or why did I go this way, and everybody went that way? That builds up on you after a while.”
Before his TV and movie career began, Michael modeled for brands such as Toys “R” Us and Modell’s Sporting Goods. His first acting role came in 1999 when he was 12 years old, appearing in The Sopranos. He played an unnamed Rideland boy in season one’s ‘Down Neck’.
You can see Michael B. Jordan in the flashback scene where Tony reflects on his childhood with his therapist. Jordan plays a child living in 1960s Newark, New Jersey, harassing a young Tony. In real life, Jordan is from Newark.
Source: NewsFinale
