Long before they shared the spotlight in 2018’s “Black Panther”, Michael B. Jordan and Chadwick Boseman actually shared a role.
When Boseman was 26, he landed the role of Reggie Montgomery on the soap opera “All My Children”, but after playing the role for only a week Boseman voiced his concerns about Montgomery being a “stereotypical thug.”
“It’s one of those things where you get a role, and you don’t really know,” Boseman told The Wrap. “When I got it, I was like, ‘This is not part of my manifesto. This is not part of what I want to do. How can I make it work?’ 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.”
He added, “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.”
Producers were not happy with Boseman’s complaints so they fired him and brought in then-16 Jordan as his replacement.
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“It’s hard to speak in the moment about how things we do can affect other people,” Jordan said. “But this is a pure example, right here on the spot — 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. 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.”
Read more from the pair in The Wrap‘s Oscar issue here.
