Michael B. Jordan Reveals His Master Plan

Michael B. Jordan had grand plans for the setting of this interview, at least at first. Fishing. Go-karting, maybe. (His team even suggested archery, an idea he seems hilariously bemused by when I reference it later.) But those were the inclinations of a Mike who thought he’d have more free time. The Mike before me this weekend is in go mode, so much so that on each of the three days we cross paths, he’s in the same economical uniform: black hoodie, black sweats or jeans. He’s in the busy beginning stages of making a movie—his second directorial effort; more on that later—and go-karts will have to wait. Today he’s opted instead for a late brunch at Granville, a restaurant not far from his home.

Is he a regular then, I ask? Not quite. “This is my first time physically being in here,” Jordan says, complimenting the vibe as he takes in the surroundings. “I order from here all the time.”

This is, as I’ve come to understand, very typical MBJ. Why go somewhere when you can just order in? Why pop out and break a veneer of privacy that gets harder to maintain with each number one box office blockbuster he notches?

It’s an unseasonably warm December afternoon in Studio City. Jordan has been this busy all year—as an actor, and as a burgeoning producer-director, but also with the non-film-related projects to which he’s applying more and more of his seemingly limitless attention and focus these days. “I think part of the goal,” he explains, “is to get to a place where my life or anything around it doesn’t change if I all of a sudden decide I may not want to work this year, or the year after that. I might want to spend time doing other things.”

Michael B. Jordan covers the March 2025 issue of GQ. Secure your copy and get one year of GQ. Jacket by Rick Owens. Watch by Richard Mille. Earring and ring by David Yurman. Grills by Alligator Jesus.

From the outside, though, 2024 looked like a relatively quiet year for Jordan. No noteworthy public appearances. No films released. No sightings spurring dating rumors. He’s been so off the grid that when he finally posted a photo dump on Instagram earlier in the month, it immediately garnered comments like “We definitely miss seeing your face!” and “Guys wakeup our husband posted.”

When I bring up his sparse social media presence at brunch, he laughs and says, “That’s kind of by design. It works for my personality because I don’t like sharing a lot anyway. So, I found that me just being myself in that type of way adds to the mystique—wanting to find out what [I’m] up to. Which I also know feeds the frenzy of other things too.”

So what has Michael B. Jordan been up to? For one thing: reteaming with his most frequent collaborator and one of Hollywood’s most exciting new-school auteurs, the writer-director Ryan Coogler. Their latest is Sinners, due later this spring—a genre film that takes a lot of big swings and connects on most of them, and a unique showcase for Jordan the actor. But instead of mapping out where he’ll vacation after the promo tour, Jordan is thinking about 2026. He’s already deep in preproduction on his next project, a remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, which he will direct as well as star in. Our brunch at Granville is sandwiched between two important Thomas Crown meetings.

“I’ve got a couple of deadlines I need to hit to wrap up the end of the year, before the town goes on break,” he explains. Victory laps will have to wait; right now he’s a young director at the mercy of a schedule, racing the clock to get his film on its feet. This will be his second time behind the camera, following his splashy debut with Creed III, but that hasn’t dulled the performance anxiety in any way. “There is a whole new set of questions the second time around,” he explains. “The second time might be harder than the first. Now you have expectations. Now it’s like, Can you do it again? ”

Ten-plus years after his big-screen breakout, Jordan could easily coast along making entertaining populist art with his friends and a streamer action movie or two in between. Instead he’s challenging himself to level up even higher, seizing opportunities and fortifying both his filmography and his legacy—while also reckoning with the costs of what devoting his time solely to those things means for the rest of his life.

Jacket by Jacquemus. Shirt Diomene by Damir Doma at Essx NYC. Pants by R13. Shoes by Camperlab. Sunglasses (throughout) by Gucci. Fidget spinner, Tools to Secure School Safety and Security #2 by © Max Siedentopf.

When I met up with Jordan earlier that weekend, it was on a rare day off. I find him relaxing in his modernist three-story Los Angeles home, the Hawks-Bucks face-off in the Emirates NBA Cup tournament playing in concert across televisions on all floors. Jordan’s foyer and living room feel warm, inviting, and lived-in—clean and tidy enough to host incoming company but not quite Architectural Digest–tour spotless. The only sign of the holiday season is a large gift-wrapped box on a side table—a gift for Jordan from his creative director Yazz, who sits nestled into the living room’s large sectional. “Nobody gives me gifts, ever,” Jordan remarks matter-of-factly. Yazz offers that maybe the people in his life just don’t realize they don’t have to “think so big” to do so. (“It’s a Japanese grill, made of this clay from a place he really loves in Japan,” Yazz would later tell me when Jordan was out of earshot. Given that Jordan just returned from his fifth trip to Japan a few months earlier and hopes to spend even more time there in the future, I’d say it probably went over well.)

Jordan invites me down to his self-proclaimed man cave, a third-level basement with an equally large TV and accompanying couch, pool table, and bar. It looks not unlike the space where Adonis Creed goes to decompress in Creed III, except for the large whiteboard conspicuously flipped upside down, on which Jordan has no doubt been plotting out his take on gentleman thief Thomas Crown, the role he’ll step into made famous by Steve McQueen and then even more famous by Pierce Brosnan.

When he first encountered Brosnan’s ’99 version, Jordan says, “I was going over to New York for auditions. I was always over in the city. And this movie [showed me] a different side of New York I didn’t even know existed.” It stuck with him, especially as he started to get closer to a Thomas Crown net worth. He’s been attached to the remake for close to 10 years, but now, at 3, he feels the project is coming to fruition exactly when it’s supposed to. Before that, he says, “I didn’t live enough life, I hadn’t experienced enough to even play a character like that. So I got a chance to live a little bit. Now is the perfect time to do it.”

Jacket by Carhartt WIP. Shirt by Brioni. Pants by White Mountaineering. Tie by Eton. Shoes by Birkenstock. Socks by Falke. Watch by Hublot. Grills (throughout) by Alligator Jesus.

With Creed III, Jordan was shepherding a beloved franchise whose tone had already been set by a maestro; reinventing Thomas Crown yet again is perhaps a taller order. One gets the impression that this is exactly why Jordan sees it as the right next step.

Are you a fear junkie? I ask as he racked a game of pool for us to shoot. “Adrenaline,” he corrects me. “For sure. I just feel like I never want to waste an opportunity. I’ve experienced and seen enough struggle. When you have an opportunity to not do that, you go for it—and you keep going. You see how far you can go. You run your race. And also, that defines who do you help along and who do you bring with you. So that’s all part of the idea, of what keeps me moving and going.”

But before Jordan could finally step into Thomas Crown’s loafers, a check-in with Coogler led unexpectedly to the chance to take on a different type of challenge first. It started with Jordan reaching out to him with a moon shot ask. He wanted to see if Coogler would direct a project Jordan had been circling—even though, as he impishly notes to me, he knew Coogler would never sign on to shoot something he hadn’t written himself.

“I was like, I’m just going to throw a shot at him. I knew I wasn’t going to get him to direct shit,” Jordan recalls with a laugh. “I was just throwing it out there to see if he was going to, but I knew he wasn’t going to do it because he only directs things that he writes. And he was like, ‘Man, I got something for you right now.’ He bypassed [the other project] and pitched me [Sinners].”

Jordan downplayed his excitement. “I was like, All right, that’s cool. We can do that too.”

Not counting Jordan’s one-scene cameo in the Black Panther sequel, Sinners will be Jordan and Coogler’s fourth film together. Their careers have run on parallel tracks ever since Coogler’s 2013 directorial debut, Fruitvale Station, established Jordan—then best known for his work on TV’s The Wire and Friday Night Lights—as a big-screen leading man. When Coogler stepped up with his first franchise swing, remixing Rocky with Creed, his choice for Donnie Creed was Jordan, who proved he could carry a mainstream hit just as sturdily as an indie. When Coogler took on Black Panther—the first Marvel film built around a Black superhero and a watershed, make-or-break moment for the company—Jordan was right there with him, turning antagonist Erik Killmonger into a memorable quasi-antihero.

Coogler knew he’d need Jordan by his side as he tackled his first purely original work, a film with no real-life source material or parent series to build on. And the experience represented a new frontier for the challenge-seeking Jordan as well. Set in the 1930s Jim Crow South, Sinners concerns ne’er-do-well twin brothers Smoke and Stack, who return to their old neighborhood from “up North” (Chicago, specifically) with a scheme to finally make some legal money. Events take a turn for the supernatural when their efforts attract the attention of an evil entity that lurks nearby.

Jacket by Post Archive Faction at Essx NYC. Turtleneck by Tom Ford. Pants Louis Vuitton Men’s. Boots by Ecco x RAL7000Studio. Spray Can, Tools to Secure School Safety and Security #15 By © Max Siedentopf.

Jordan plays both brothers, holding the film together with two commanding yet distinct performances. Smoke is a somewhat classic MBJ type—taciturn, capable, determined—while Stack is slick, gregarious, quick-witted, a charmer prone to ball-busting and defusing tense situations with a wisecrack. The role(s), Coogler suggests, represent Jordan’s first time—in a Coogler film, at least—playing a character who’s already come of age. “These are fully-formed men,” the director says. “Like they are who they’re gonna be, you know what I’m saying? But also Mike has a maturity to him now, [more] than he ever has on a movie before.”

Out of all the major roles he’s played, Jordan suggests, Stack is closest to his real personality. “When [my friends] see it for the first time,” he says, “I think they’re going to find that refreshing.” Coogler agrees that—while he saw elements of “Mike” in Oscar Grant, Creed, and Killmonger—“he’s very far from those guys. Mike’s very funny and mercurial and energetic.” In turn, Coogler says, watching Jordan bring to life the more intense and world-weary Smoke was sometimes a disturbing experience. “As someone who knows him,” the director says, “there were a few times I was unnerved.”

Although it’s been shrewdly marketed as a genre film, Sinners is also a statement about how Black culture in America flourishes even under constant threat from predators seeking to disrupt and subsume it. It’s fun and entertaining, yes, and often quite brutal, but also unexpectedly poignant. Coogler screened the film for me, Jordan, a few members of his team, and some Warner Bros. execs the Friday evening before we met; the next day Jordan admitted to getting a “little choked up,” even though this wasn’t his first time watching it in its entirety. (He opted to sit a couple of rows ahead of me, so I can neither confirm nor deny.)

It’s hard not to note the irony of Coogler and Jordan’s pulling off their own Black-centric action-horror film amid Marvel’s ongoing struggle to relaunch Blade, a property that in theory should be a badass horror-adventure layup. Jordan, as you might expect from a man plotting his own reboot of a beloved ’90s film, is empathetic to the studio’s difficulties. “Launching any franchise, it’s tough,” he says. “I hope it gets together. I want to see a Blade movie, you know what I’m saying? The Blade franchise was everything.” As for the critical rough patch Marvel has been facing, Jordan is diplomatic. “[Marvel’s] doing great,” he says. “They’ll get it back.”

Jacket and t-shirt by Maison Margiela. Pants by Emporio Armani. Watch by Vanguart. Necklace and bracelet (throughout) by David Yurman.

After unlocking his third eye on Creed III, when he got to the Sinners set he found himself still mentally running through the same “system checklist” he developed as a director, so much so that he was often anticipating and facilitating needs beyond his role as an actor to help move the shoot along seamlessly. One gets the sense that going forward, Coogler is on a very short list of filmmakers who’ll be able to get Michael B. Jordan involved in a film that he doesn’t have some sort of creative control over. (Some other names on that list: “Shit, man, I would love to work with [Christopher] Nolan,” Jordan says. “The Safdie brothers are great. [Jeremy Saulnier], I would fuck with him.”)

“It’s a lot easier for me to say no [to projects],” Jordan admits. “Look, if I was only moving for profit, my résumé would look a lot different. It’d have six more projects on there. [Producers] will see you in something and be like, Oh yeah, you would be great for this, because of this. It’s like, You want me to do that, again? That’s sometimes boring for us, you know?”

He’s even getting antsy to move away from sequels and remakes, telling me that after Thomas Crown he’s already planning to direct “something original next. I think I’m going to have to.” Beyond collaborating with a writer to bring his own ideas to life, he’s looking forward to a future where he can direct without also starring, or at least being the lead.

“The challenge of acting and directing wasn’t as daunting as I thought it was,” Jordan says with a shrug, as he effortlessly knocks three striped balls into separate pockets. “Honestly, it’s really the time—the prep in the beginning.”

Time—there’s that word again. Despite his unflappably cool and steady demeanor, when Jordan talks about the projects he has in various states of production, other ventures like his beverage line, Moss, and finding time for his family—his nephew’s fifth birthday party is currently in progress at a family member’s house 15 minutes away while he’s here washing me at pool—you can practically see the 60 Minutes stopwatch ticking furiously in his head.

Why, 10 years into his run as the kind of leading man most pundits consider endangered, does he feel the need to still go this hard?

“You spend such a long time, and a big part of your early stages, trying to get to a certain point and be successful, check off your goals—[while] being told ‘no’ a lot,” Jordan says. “So when you get to a position now where you can move and impose your will in certain situations and create things, and have your own agency—I spent more time struggling and trying to build something than I have been in a position where I can be moving. I’m not content. I’m going to continue to build and grow.”

Coat by Gucci. Tank top by Calvin Klein. Pants by Balenciaga. Shoes by Christian Louboutin. Gloves, stylist’s own.

Part of that motivation is likely spurred by watching how tenuous good standing can be within an industry where fortunes can change literally overnight. During the long promo rollout for Creed III, Jordan spoke often of the bond he’d formed with his costar Jonathan Majors, whose next-big-thing energy was surging thanks to another blockbuster opening that year meant to center him as a major character in the MCU. Majors’s rise came to a screeching halt soon thereafter, after an incident with his then girlfriend left him facing trial on misdemeanor assault and harassment charges. When Majors was found guilty of one count of reckless assault in the third degree and a charge of harassment as a violation (he was found not guilty of intentional assault in the third degree and aggravated harassment in the second degree), Marvel and other big studios scuttled their plans for him, and he went from ascendant leading man to pariah.

Jordan has mostly steered clear of commenting on Majors’s case. Today, sitting on the edge of the pool table, he solemnly recalls that it was a “tough situation” to watch unfold. “But he’s doing great, just got engaged. I’m proud of his resilience and his strength through it all, and [his] handling [of] it. I’m glad he’s good. That’s my boy,” Jordan says.

Would you work with him again?

“Yes. Yes.”

Still, the endeavor of staying überfocused comes with other expenses even if one avoids trouble. “There’s a bunch that I’m sacrificing,” he says. “Everything comes with some type of cost and then those are the ones that you start to feel more as you grow older.”

Jumpsuit by Rick Owens. Shoes by Crocs. Earrings by David Yurman.

Jordan once told this magazine that he intended to “sacrifice all my 20s to my work” and would “live a little” afterwards; he’s well past that cutoff now and seems at peace with his priorities. But a natural sense of what-if inevitably still nags at him. When we met, he was just two months shy of his 38th birthday. “Like, my dad had two kids at this age, you know what I’m saying?” Jordan says. “But you got to realize, the time you do put in, you’re building something solid.”

If he had carved out time to build a family of his own by now, I offer, his head-down approach to tackling all things would mean either home or work would end up shortchanged.

“And that is my perspective on raising [my stop date] a little bit,” Jordan says animatedly, grateful for the lifeline. “Just because I’m competitive, and I know I would want to be the best dad. But right now, I’m trying to do my best at this part [of my life] as well.”

His love life is the subject he’s least excited to offer any comment on, remarking that his longest relationship—he doesn’t name names—lasted just over a year. The tone of his voice suggests he wasn’t shocked it didn’t go longer.

“I’m not tripping over it,” Jordan says with a shrug. “I’m so work focused. I would want somebody to fit into the flow of my life, of where I am. And that’s timing, right? You can meet the right person, and be at the wrong time, and it just doesn’t work out. I think the person that’s going to be right for me lines up with the timing with who she is as a person, where I’m at in my life, how open I am to even...to that, you know?”

These are thoughts much too heady for a Saturday afternoon off during the holiday season. If I wasn’t here, and there wasn’t a kid’s birthday down the block, what would he be doing to decompress? “Come on, let’s go,” he says. “I’ll show you.”

Five minutes later we’re roaring out of Jordan’s front gate in his fatigue green Ferrari 812 GTS, the latest addition to his three-car collection. Night drives on the highway and long winding roads of his neighborhood are his go-to method of relaxation, he says. As we hug the curves around his block, blasting throwback jams like “Return of the Mack,” Jordan explains that he already has one foot out of the neighborhood. He’s considered selling his house, reasoning that it’s too big for just him.

It isn’t hard to draw a line from that sentiment to the conversation we were just having in his basement, but instead of dwelling on his bachelor status as a form of sacrifice, he looks to the possibilities it offers. “I think I might spend more time traveling in the next upcoming period of my life,” he says. “For leisure. The workaholic part—it’s getting to a point where I feel like I could just get away for a little bit, or just not have the mental pressure from it.”

We drive around some more, with Jordan commenting on some of the “regular” things he likes to do in the area, like go to a farmers market—“For food, n-gga,” he says with a cackle, when I mishear the phrase as “flea markets”—before we end up at his gate again. Jordan invites me back in, even though we’ve already gone over our allotted session time, but instead I let him off the hook. He’s got a birthday party to get to.

As he slides into his seat on Sunday at Granville, Jordan admits he’s not a morning person. “But I have to be. I’m a night owl, I’m up all night, you understand? It’s hard for me to go to sleep at night, because it’s hard to turn the brain off. So that usually leads to wanting to sleep in, but then I always have to get up early, so I don’t really get a chance to do that much.”

That state of affairs seems unlikely to change anytime soon. Sinners’ spring release means that Jordan will be rolling straight from the red carpet to the set of Thomas Crown (MBJ’s Version) in London. The work he’s doing now will ensure that there’s a movie for him to make when he gets there.

“I consider it like cooking,” Jordan says of the preproduction process. “You go to the grocery store, you got to get all your ingredients. I’m in the shopping phase, figuring out what meal I want to make. Then you go back to the house and you’re like, All right, how do I assemble this? ” The invisible stopwatch over his head ticks louder and with more furious intention. He sits back as if slightly dazed, collecting his thoughts and refocusing on the current task at hand. “I thrive off it, but you get moments where it’s like, Whoa. Okay, let me just…. Where am I going? What am I doing? Who am I talking to? Okay, cool.”

Jacket (top) by Stone Island. Jacket (bottom) by Carhartt WIP. Jeans by Calvin Klein. Sneakers by Reebok. Gloves, stylist’s ow. Earring by David Yurman.

Jordan doesn’t just look to other, older actors as a blueprint for what he’s building. He cites Will Smith’s and Leonardo DiCaprio’s filmographies—object lessons in how to maneuver and readjust, when to max out your moment, how to work only when you want to work—and references gems of wisdom he’s received from “D.” (“To be clear,” he says into the recorder, correcting himself: “Mr. Washington.”) But tellingly, when speaking of role models, he also invokes LeBron James and Jay-Z—specifically, the ways they’ve built up their respective companies, SpringHill and Roc Nation, into full-service entertainment empires and staffed them with members of their crews who’ve been down since day one.

In addition to Moss, Jordan will be unveiling his own rum sometime in the future as well. And one day soon he’d love to take his love for (non-metaphorical) cooking public by opening an actual restaurant. After that, he’s dead serious about doubling down on hospitality with a hotel venture. It’s all a part of Jordan’s loose 5- or 10-year plan—which is also about building an off-ramp to a life away from movie sets.

“I want to fucking take my niece and nephew out, take them on vacation with me and not have to be this other thing to everybody else. Just go do that and let them get a chance to know that part of me. When they get older they’ll understand, but at this time they don’t. Spend quality time with my parents, you know what I’m saying?”

I guess my larger question is: How long do you think you’re going to keep trying to attempt to do everything?

“Until I don’t have to do it anymore.”

When is that?

“Only God knows, man,” Jordan says. “I’m not sure…. I’m hoping that one day something clicks where it’s like, You don’t have to work at the same pace that you worked at your entire career. I think it’s coming soon. But I said this 10 years ago. I really, really, really think it’s coming soon. I really do. I really do. My 40th birthday? 40? 40!”

Frazier Tharpe is GQ’s senior associate editor.

A version of this story originally appeared in the March 2025 issue of GQ with the title “Michael B. Jordan Wants to Slow Down (But Not Right Now)”

PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Jack Bridgland
Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu
Barbering by Jove Edmond
Grooming by Tasha Reiko Brown for Chanel
Special makeup effects by Malina Stearns
Tailoring by Yelena Travkina
Set design by Brittany Porter
Produced by Photobomb Production