To play twins Smoke and Stack in Ryan Coogler’s film, Michael B Jordan developed complex back stories to help deepen the two performances. The actor tells all to Screen.
When Ryan Coogler needed an actor to play identical twins in his period vampire horror Sinners, he immediately thought of Michael B Jordan, who had starred in his first four features, beginning with 2013’s Fruitvale Station and including Creed and Black Panther. At the time, Jordan wanted to pitch something of his own to Coogler, but it fell to the wayside on hearing about Sinners.
“I said yes before I hung up the phone, which usually happens when he ends up pitching me a project,” laughs Jordan. But he was nervous about taking on the dual roles of Smoke and Stack, twin brothers who return to their 1930s Deep South Mississippi Delta home with the dream of running a juke joint, only to fall foul of Jack O’Connell’s Irish vampire. “I knew I had to push myself in places I hadn’t been,” he says. “And I’d be putting myself out there in a big way.”
Smoke is the (slightly) older, dominant brother; Stack is more gregarious, less pragmatic. To differentiate them visually, Coogler opted for a simple colour scheme: blue for Smoke, red for Stack. But Jordan started by digging into their childhood trauma to delineate them further.
“Ryan talked me through how they grew up,” says Jordan. “At birth, they lost their mother — that’s something their father held over the youngest — and that shaped their personalities and who they were moving forward. Smoke held his pain inside and didn’t speak much; Stack masked a lot of his pain with charisma and personality, not dwelling on one thing for too long. He’s always moving, always has an idea, always wants to talk.”
For Smoke, Jordan decided to wear shoes that were one size too big. “Because I wanted him to be planted, rooted. He’s like an immovable force until he decides to move,” he explains. “For Stack, I wore a half-size too small — I couldn’t do a [full] size — because I needed him to move, talk and be light on his feet. That informed how they stood, the way they walked and the cadence in which they spoke. Smoke didn’t like talking a lot, he chose his words wisely.”
Alongside their different clothes, voices and energy, Smoke and Stack sport subtly altered hairstyles, make-up, eyebrows, even jawlines. And wear different gold grills on their teeth. “That’s when I really dialled into that person, because if you put anything on your teeth, it changes the way you speak,” says Jordan. “Those little touches helped me stay clear on one or the other. By the second week, everybody picked up on this nuance. When I’m Smoke, I’m not that personable. But Stack, when he comes on set, I’m talking to everybody. That was interesting. I never had that dynamic on set before.”
Mood music
Typically, it would take Jordan 20-30 minutes to switch between characters. “On a film, you never have enough time, so I was always trying to get back to set as quickly as I could,” he says. “But with this, I needed to take an extra three minutes to go through my voice exercises, listen to songs that were specific to Smoke and got him into an emotional and a mental state.” That meant Charley Patton, Taj Mahal and Muddy Waters. Stack’s playlist was James Brown and Roy Hargrove. For the pair, it was Bone Thugs-N-Harmony and Young Dolph.
When it came to filming the twins, Jordan would play a scene as either Smoke or Stack, with double Percy Bell standing in for the other. He repeated the scene as the other brother, before the two shots were stitched together digitally. He would wear a ‘halo’ rig for scenes where the brothers interact physically and facial replacement was required — a carbon fibre device with 10 action cameras pointed at his head.
Coogler chose which brother to film first depending on who was leading the scene. “I tried to do Stack first because I would have the most energy,” says the actor. “When I get tired, it’s easier for me to be Smoke. Obviously, it didn’t always work out that way.” There were days when Jordan would change between the twins more than once.
“But whatever brother went first set the rules of the scene,” he says. “So whatever character choices I would make, I had to always think about the other brother and what he would react to, and how I wanted to craft his blocking and movements, because he couldn’t operate in the same space. So, I would direct my twin double. The technical aspect of it, the continuity and the blocking, raised my game.”
Prior to Sinners — which was released by Warner Bros in April, grossing $368m worldwide — Jordan had directed his first feature Creed III. “So, I had a different pair of eyes. That was helpful in some ways, to the production, to Coog, to help him get ahead of what I know is coming. You can’t turn that part of your brain off once you have that.”
It was Coogler, he says, who had encouraged him to direct. “He was probably the first person to say, ‘Man, you need to step behind the camera.’ Watching him, someone that looked like me, close to the same age, that representation, I was like, ‘Okay, maybe I could do this too.’”
Since wrapping Sinners, Jordan has spent the past 11 months in the UK, directing, producing and starring in a remake of The Thomas Crown Affair for Amazon MGM Studios. He has about a week left on the film when Screen International meets him in mid-November. “I have some cool twists and surprises for the audience,” promises the actor. “[With] the other iterations of the movie, it’s like Crown versus a bigger system or versus himself, in a way, that boredom. This Crown has more personal stakes.”
Post-Crown, Jordan has plenty of potential projects lined up, including a new version of Miami Vice, directed by F1’s Joseph Kosinski and rumoured to pair the actor with Austin Butler. “Probably can’t answer that one,” he smiles when the subject is raised. “But I love the show. I think Joe is a great director. He’s definitely somebody I want to work with. We had a lot of his crew from F1 on Crown, and I’ve been hearing amazing things about him.”
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