Michael B. Jordan has been collaborating with director Ryan Coogler for over a decade, but their 2025 movie release, Sinners, may be their most emotionally personal project yet. The new horror movie is part Southern gothic, part crime saga, part vampire fable, and has been a box office hit, extending the duo’s near-flawless run from Fruitvale Station to Black Panther. Jordan is now sharing some thoughts about the late Chadwick Boseman and talks about a challenge Ryan threw at him on the set of Sinners that stuck with him.
In a recent interview with Deadline, Jordan opened up about how hard Boseman’s loss hit him. He shared how Coogler caught him off guard with a tough question during production that made him think about the loss of the former T'Challa performer:
Chadwick Boseman means a lot to us, and once Ryan challenged me by asking, what would Chad be doing right now? And shit, man, it broke us up, man. It broke us up, meaning emotionally. But he ain’t had to say nothing else after that. That was one of the buttons that he could push. And I felt [Chadwick] around me during this.
According to the Creed actor, he didn’t require further explanation, but the director’s comments changed his perspective on everything. Jordan went on to share an even more emotional connection, one to his family:
My grandmother was around me during this. It’s crazy. What really resonated to me while we were doing this, I started flashing back to just childhood memories or just in general when I’m going to my grandmother’s house and looking at old photo albums with my mom. And my grandparents and my great grandparents and cousins and aunts and everything, from the thirties and the twenties and the forties. I realized when I looked at these photographs, I’ve only known them in my life as older people, as grandparents and great aunts and great uncles and great aunts and great great uncles.
The realization hit The Wire veteran hard. Those old black-and-white photos weren’t just faded memories, but windows into real lives full of dreams, love, hustle, and pain. He continued:
I was like, wait, they were my age when they were in these photos. They were trying to make it as entrepreneurs, they were dancing, having fun, laughing, partying, trying to make ends meet, they were struck, all the things. I was like, man, so this is a movie for them. I’m walking in their shoes right now and living what they went through. Pulling on them and trying to infuse that was really, really important.
Jordan’s performance in Sinners isn’t just physical or emotional, it’s ancestral in a way. And it’s clear that Boseman’s legacy was a guiding force behind his onscreen intensity. If you’ve seen the MCU movies in order, you know that the actor previously shouldered a similar emotional load when portraying Killmonger.
The recent vampire movie has Jordan pushing himself again by taking on the challenge of playing twin characters, each with their unique ways of dealing with trauma, body language, and speech styles. Pulling off both Smoke and Stack was a real technical achievement. Still, it was the emotional impact—channeling Boseman and connecting with his family’s legacy—that made his performance stand out. And that alone is worth the price of a ticket.
Sinners is currently playing in theaters. Check local listings for showtimes. You can also revisit Jordan and Boseman sharing the screen (under Coogler’s direction) in Black Panther, available to stream with a Disney+ subscription.
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