What you need to know
Michael B. Jordan needed to make a name for himself.
In an interview with CBS Sunday Morning on January 4, Jordan, 38, spoke about his life and career. CBS correspondent Tracy Smith asked the Sinners star if having the same name as Chicago Bulls legend Michael Jordan was a “problem” from an early age.
“It’s important!” the Creed star said. “I was made fun of so much that I almost changed my name.”
His original plan was to go by his middle name, Bakari. “It definitely made me want to be competitive and be great at something. If for no other reason at the time, I wanted to be great at something just to feel like I had my own identity,” he explained.
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Having the same name as the NBA Hall of Famer “was part of the alchemy that made me who I am today,” he said.
Smith pointed out that the name Bakari means “noble promise” in Swahili and asked if Jordan felt true to the name.
“I feel like I’m walking through it, and I’m going to continue to do so,” he said. “We still have a lot of work to do, you know? We’re just getting started.”
Jordan was named after his father, Michael A. Jordan. He said in a conversation on Variety’s Actors on Actors in December that his father is older than the Space Jam star.
Jordan’s career began as a child model and then moved on to acting. His breakout role was as Wallace in The Wire in 2002, and in 2003 he joined All My Children as Reggie Porter Montgomery. From 2009 to 2011, he appeared on Friday Night Lights as Vince Howard. And in 2013, she received critical acclaim for her performance in Fruitvale Station, directed by her now frequent co-star Ryan Coogler. He has since appeared in Black Panther, the Creed movies, and 2025, which has garnered him some serious Oscar buzz.
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Back in November, Jordan opened up to PEOPLE about how his soap opera past helped him with the next phase of his career. He said the “time spent on soap operas” ended up being one of the biggest surprises of his career.
“I didn’t know how many casting directors and executives in Hollywood would say to me, ‘Oh, my wife really loves you,’ or, ‘Oh, she’s always watching your stories…come to read this, come to read that,'” he said.
He explained: “It opened so many doors for me in the most unexpected places. And it was…looking back, I think it was definitely something that caught me off guard. I wasn’t expecting it. I mean, that and The Wire were the two projects that really opened a lot of doors for me in that sense.”
Jordan also said that the soap opera’s intensive production schedule helped shape the way he worked. “I think soap operas produce over 100 pages a day,” he said. “The work ethic, that struggle definitely gave me a built-in work ethic and helped me hone that discipline from an early age. Yeah, for sure.”
