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Although he is under 40 years old, Michael B Jordan has been acting for nearly his entire life, having earned roles in The Wire and Friday Night Lights before getting his breakthrough showcase role in the science fiction thriller Chronicle, alongside Dane DeHaan.
From a young age, Jordan quickly started appearing in features that were hit and miss in terms of quality, but his career jumped to the next level thanks to his collaborations with writer and director Ryan Coogler.
Coogler has made five films, and Jordan has starred in all of them, starting with Fruitvale Station, which helped establish him as a legitimate actor, to the latest Sinners, which earned him the Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’. However, the most influential of the films the duo have made together might be their second collaboration, Creed, which helped relaunch the Rocky franchise by centring on the new character Adonis Creed, son of Carl Weathers’ Apollo Creed from the original films.
Creed moved past the ridiculous storyline in Rocky IV, where Apollo was killed off to show how his son had grown up without a father, and brought back Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky to be Adonis’ mentor. Similar to how Stallone began to direct the Rocky sequels after starring in and writing the original, Jordan was given the chance to make his directorial debut with Creed III.
In order to differentiate the third instalment in the spinoff franchise from everything that had come before it, Jordan used his love of anime and other Japanese animated films to result in stylised fight scenes and inspire the visual aesthetics.
Thus, it should come as no surprise that he is also an admirer of the brilliant Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, who has many films that can be considered among the best animated features ever made, but for Jordan, the 1997 fantasy epic Princess Mononoke is his all-time favourite.
“It’s truly special,” he said, “Every time it’s on, I watch it. I have to experience something like this. Down to the movement of the smoke and the flames in this movie, it’s beautiful”.
Princess Mononoke was one of Miyazaki’s most ambitious films, as it combined the mythological worldbuilding he had established with Castle in the Sky, and unified it with a powerful coming-of-age story intertwined with an environmentalist message about spirituality with nature. Even if the film was specifically based on Japanese myths, it ended up being one of Miyazaki’s biggest hits overseas, which gained greater traction, thanks to a 1999 English dub that included voice actors like Billy Crudup, Claire Danes, Minnie Driver, and Billy Bob Thornton.
Princess Mononoke is such a quintessential ‘hero’s journey’ story that it’s unsurprising that it inspired Jordan to play larger-than-life heroes like Adonis, Bryan Stevenson in Just Mercy, and even Johnny Storm in the ill-fated Fantastic Four reboot from 2015.
Given how directly connected to Princess Mononoke and other anime Creed III was, it will be fascinating to see how that influence surfaces on Jordan’s next project as a filmmaker. He is both starring and directing a remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, in which he will portray the titular character previously played by Steve McQueen and Pierce Brosnan in the 1968 and 1999 films, respectively.
