In the span of three days, Michael B. Jordan celebrated his 39th birthday, had a Super Bowl party with his family (including some postgame karaoke), and attended the Oscars 2026 nominees luncheon as a first-time nominee.
“When did too much celebrating become a thing?” Jordan tells Little Gold Men with a smirk. “I’ve been so blessed and fortunate to have so many things going on—and successful things at that.”
Jordan has so much to celebrate, earning his first Oscar nomination for playing twins Smoke and Stack in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. The film earned a history-making 16 Oscar nominations, along with being a box office smash, and much of its success is due to Jordan’s delicate and dynamic work as two wholly unique characters.
Sinners is a culmination of the career-spanning collaboration between Jordan and Coogler, who first worked together on 2013’s Fruitvale Station, followed by Creed (2015), Black Panther (2018), and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022). Their partnership has resulted in the most demanding work of Jordan’s long career, which started when he was just 12 years old (with a brief appearance on The Sopranos) before his breakout on The Wire when he was 15.
Jordan has been intentional in the way he’s built a Hollywood career, becoming a producer and, eventually, a director with Creed III. As he’s been promoting Sinners for the past year, he’s been hard at work on his next directorial project, a remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, in which he also stars. Now, along with all that celebrating, he’s spending all his time editing the film, which is scheduled for release in March 2027.
After the Oscar nominees luncheon earlier in February, Jordan took a little time out of his packed schedule to talk to Little Gold Men (listen or read on below) about the demanding dance of playing twins in Sinners, how therapy has helped him as an actor, and why helming The Thomas Crown Affair has been much more challenging than his first directorial effort.
Vanity Fair: What was your very first step when you decided to take on playing Smoke and Stack for Sinners?
Michael B. Jordan: I had to write their back stories. I got journals for Smoke and Stack, and had an opportunity to really crack through their childhood with Ryan, and be as colorful as we needed to be. Go through those milestones, the childhood trauma that they carried with them, the trauma of their environment and the world that they were living, the era that they were living in. And then everything else is like building a house—it’s layers and layers and layers that you kind of have to dive into. And then doing some chakra work and some energy work to really identify where he’s holding his pain, where he’s holding his trauma, and let that dictate and determine a little bit of his cadence in which they speak, the way that they walk.