‘We Grew Up Together, Bro’: How Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan Blazed Their Way to ‘Sinners’

Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan remember their first meeting vividly. Coogler was 27, a recent USC graduate looking to cast his first feature film; Jordan was a year younger, an actor best known for roles in the TV series “The Wire,” “Friday Night Lights” and “Parenthood.” The two met in Forest Whitaker’s production office near Hollywood in 2012, and Jordan suggested they go across the street to a Starbucks to continue the conversation. Jordan, born in Southern California but raised in New Jersey, walked out of the office and straight into Cahuenga Boulevard traffic, shocking the Oakland-born-and-bred Coogler.

“I looked at him and said, Come on, they’re gonna stop!” Jordan said, laughing. “And then, man, we just hit it off.”

Coogler was seeking the lead in his movie “Fruitvale Station,” about a 22-year-old Oakland man who was shot and killed by a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer in 2009. He wasn’t thrilled at the idea of charging across Cahuenga — “maybe they stop for you in Newark, but in California you’re putting your life in danger” — but at some point in that Starbucks, he decided to bet on this guy. “I said, ‘Hey, man, I think you’re a movie star. Let’s do this project together and show the world.’”

“It was the first time anybody told me that, without a doubt,” Jordan said. “At that point I was going around town and introducing myself and trying to get on people’s minds, but there was never somebody saying, ‘This is what I think you can do.’ I would look at myself in the bathroom mirror and try to build up the belief that I was gonna be successful, but I never knew how directors or writers or filmmakers thought about me. But when Ryan said it in that Starbucks, that was the first.”

It wasn’t the last. “Fruitvale Station” was a remarkably powerful debut, making Jordan every inch a leading man and Coogler a director to watch. Their next collaboration, the Rocky spinoff “Creed” was a critical and commercial hit. Marvel came calling and handed Coogler the reins to “Black Panther.” In return, they got themselves a $1.35 billion smash, with Chadwick Boseman as the title character and Jordan as the relentless antagonist Erik “Killmonger” Stevens, who dies in the first film but returns in spirit form in the sequel, “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”

Jordan has made plenty of movies without Coogler, among them “Fantastic Four,” “Creed II” and “Creed III” and “Just Mercy” — but 13 years after that first meeting, the two men are essential collaborators.

“He’s a phenomenal storyteller,” Jordan said. “There’s a genuine realness to him, and I know that when I’m working with him, I get to be the best version of myself in front of the camera. He’s going to capture that best version and he’s going to push me along the way to get to it.”

And now they’ve done it again with “Sinners,” a vampire movie set in the Mississippi Delta in the 1930s, where the cultural life of the Black community is embodied in the deep blues music played in a juke joint owned by Smoke and Stack, twin brothers (both played by Jordan) who hit it big in the Chicago criminal world and come back home to escape the heat. It’s a horror movie of sorts — but as usual for Coogler, the genre trappings are used to explore issues of racial identity. The white populace of Clarksdale plans to kill the Blacks who dare to buy property in their town; the vampires, led by an Irishman, want everyone to join their undead community.

“It was definitely a movie I had to grow into,” Coogler said of the bold and complex film, in part a tribute to a blues-loving uncle who died 10 years ago. “It’s been a decade since his passing for me to process it, metabolize it, as they say, to the point that I could have something to say about it artistically.”

As a young man brought up on rap music, he also had to develop an appreciation of the blues, which in some ways served the same purpose for its performers and audience in the 1920s and ’30s that hip-hop did half a century later.

“The Delta blues was an art form by people who were declaring their humanity against so many powerful structures and practices and cultures that were saying, ‘No, you’re not a full human being,’” Coogler said. “These people used their art as a form of entertainment, as a form of release, as a coping mechanism. And that art was so great that whenever another human being hears it, they can’t help but relate. They can’t help but participate. They can’t help but repeat it. That, for me, is where the film lies. And that, for me, is also where cinema should lie.”

Coogler also made a move to retain ownership of his film about Black cultural legacy: In a deal with Warner Bros. reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino’s agreement with Sony for “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood,” the rights to “Sinners” will revert to the filmmaker after 25 years. And despite the terrible year at the box office, Coogler’s film was a smash, grossing $280 million in the U.S. and $368 million worldwide on a $90 million budget.

For Jordan, “Sinners” wasn’t just an complicated technical exercise that found him playing two distinct characters who were often in the same scene together. Elijah “Smoke” Moore is measured, laid-back and cautious, while his brother, Elias “Stack” Moore, is brash, a hyperkinetic hustler. As Smoke, Jordan wore shoes that were one size too big and moved only when he had to; as Stack, he wore shoes one size too small and was always agitated and in motion.

“When I’m Smoke, I’m really quiet but I observe a lot,” he said. “On the set, I’m looking at everything, taking everything in. When I’m Stack, I’m much more in the mix — talking to the crew, talking to the cast, bouncing from one department to another, moving around the set.”

He has an incredible sense of empathy and a way of storytelling that allows other people to empathize with the characters — even the ones that you’re not supposed to like.

Michael B. Jordan on Ryan Coogler

He shook his head slowly. “Man, talking about this is actually wild. I got a chance to have two different experiences on the same set. And it wasn’t like I was imagining it in my head, like ‘Now I’m this person, and now I’m the next person.’ No, when I’m Stack, that’s what the world is telling me: I have all 200 people on the set treating me like Stack. But when I change over to Smoke, my reality changes, in my head but also out in the world. It’s like ‘The Truman Show,’ you know what I’m saying? Everybody’s bought in on the thing, so the illusion is completely seamless. It allowed me to live in those spaces as two different people.”

Make that three different people, because by the end of the movie (spoiler alert!) Stack is a vampire. “Oh, the vampire version of Stack was a lot of fun,” he said, laughing. “That’s when there was nothing I couldn’t do or say. It was just like, ‘Free rein today!’ It was time to have fun and cause mayhem.”

But there was another side to Jordan’s life on the set that was more important than relating to the crew in character(s). “For this movie, it was great to see Mike with Miles,” Coogler said of Miles Caton, the 21-year-old actor who plays Smoke and Stack’s young cousin, aspiring blues musician Sammie ‘Preacherboy’ Moore. “It was this young man’s first film, and I would watch them in between takes. Mike would talk to him about his life and about the craft, and I’d think to myself, wow, man. Mike had a lot of work to do, so it would be understandable if he just stayed in his interior world so that he could realize these two characters. But nah, he was right there with that kid, making sure he was taken care of.”

Jordan said he used a couple of different approaches to take care of Caton. “I would find a way to do whatever I needed to do within the character that I was playing,” he said. “Miles might’ve gotten two different versions of advice from me. He would’ve gotten a version coming outta Stack’s mouth that might’ve been real graphic and wild, and he might have to laugh his way through it. And then, if I’m in a Smoke persona, he’ll get a very stern, direct talk. Not a lot of banter, but I’m telling you something and you should listen.”

Either way, the idea of mentorship has been crucial to Jordan since early in his career, when Ben Affleck contacted him out of the blue. “He was one of the first people to call me after ‘Fruitvale Station’ came out,” he said. “He asked me to go to lunch and said, ‘Hey, man, look, I know what you’re going through right now.’ That meant the world to me, to know I’m not the only person that feels like this. Like, I thought it was just me going crazy, right? I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to expect. People sometimes don’t take into consideration how impactful it can be to get a call or a simple ‘Call me if you need me.’ So I try to be that for other people too.”

And now, 13 years and five movies into this Starbucks on Cahuenga Boulevard and today, how has Ryan Coogler changed?

“Barely f–ing at all!” Jordan said, breaking into a big laugh. “Besides him getting older and having three kids and being married, he’s kind of the same guy, which is beautiful. He’s a better, more involved, wiser version of himself, you know? He’s unapologetically who he is. He’s so passionate about movies and filmmaking, and he’s just gotten better with time. He has an incredible sense of empathy and a way of storytelling that allows other people to empathize with the characters — even the ones that you’re not supposed to like.”

He’s changed in so many ways. His whole life changed. He can’t sit in a Starbucks anymore. He’s so famous now that he can’t do normal things.

Ryan Coogler on Michael B. Jordan

Coogler thought about this for a minute, then shrugged. “I would say for me it’s maturity, for sure. My wife, Zinzi, was always there and in a creative capacity, but convincing her to make that more official has been a massive change, and a lot of blessings have come out of that.” (The two were married in 2016, and she cofounded Proximity Media with him and Sev Ohanian two years later.) A pause. “But I think the biggest thing for me is just accepting that this is my life, working in this artistic business. And I want this to be my life for the foreseeable future. I think accepting that was difficult when I first met Mike.”

And now for the second question: How has Michael B. Jordan changed over the past 13 years?

“It’s interesting, man,” Coogler said. “It’s a great day to ask me that question, because I was really moved last night (at American Cinematheque’s Jordan tribute) seeing images of him when he was a kid, hearing his voice when it was cracking, still.”

His voice got softer. “We grew up together, bro. He’s changed in so many ways. His whole life changed. He can’t sit in a Starbucks anymore. He’s so famous now that he can’t do normal things. But he’s basically become an adult. I’ve seen him build a business and I’ve seen him take on the role of philanthropist. I can look at the chessboard in front of him and see where the other moves are coming, but he always surprises me.”

When Jordan considered the same query, he too paused and spoke more quietly. “I like to think I’m the same in all the ways that matter,” he said. “Maybe I’m a little more selective in how much access I give to people — that might be something that I’ve evolved into over the years, just understanding you can’t give all of yourself to everyone all the time or you’ll have nothing left at the end of the day for you. So learning to regulate that with moderation has been one of the bigger things I’ve learned over the years. I do miss going to farmers markets and stuff like that. I’m trying to find a piece of normal in this not-normal lifestyle that I live.

“But you’ve got an invisible contract with the audience and the fans, and at a certain point you do belong to the world. People watch the movies I do and maybe it helps them get through a tough time, or they hear something you said in an interview that might’ve got them to a better place in their lives. That ability to do something that might affect somebody’s life by creating art and storytelling — that’s what this is about, man.”

This story first ran in the Actors/Directors/Screenwriters issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. You can read about the “Sinners” supporting cast here and see more photos from our “Sinners” shoot here.

Read more from the Actors/Directors/Screenwriters issue here.