Michael B. Jordan as Adonis Johnson in Creed.
Barry Wetcher/Warner Bros.
There’s a moment in Creed, the new Rocky spin-off of sorts, where Adonis Johnson knocks the living daylights out of a local rapper who mocks him by calling him Baby Creed.
The up-and-coming boxer is the son of legend Apollo Creed — who had an affair with Adonis's mother — but Adonis is pissed. He’s worked hard to get to where he is, to make a name for himself, and to keep the name of his father (who died in the ring fighting an unsympathetic Russian contender in RockyIV) a secret. So when some guy — who, like the rest of the world at this point in the film, has learned of his heritage — tries to belittle Adonis’s accomplishments, as if he’d be comfortable riding on someone else’s coattails (or stars-and-stripes shorts), he decides to start the fight before the fight.
That scene, in many ways, parallels where the actor who portrays Adonis, Michael B. Jordan, is in his career right now: He is ready for his own battle.
By all accounts, Hollywood insiders consider 28-year-old Jordan the heir apparent to the thrones that Denzel Washington and Will Smith have built. For decades, those actors have established themselves as box office champions and they’re in a very small and exclusive fraternity — black men who can land leading roles in successful, high-profile feature films.
Creed is a continuation of the beloved, long-running Rocky franchise that made Sylvester Stallone famous in the title role, and now it’s about to do the same for Jordan.
But no matter how hungry we are for the next Washington or Smith, Jordan isn’t quite ready to raise his hand for that part.
He’s got other plans.
“I don’t think I have the pressure to be the next anybody,” he said, after tossing the idea around in his head for a few minutes. “I don’t put that on myself. I need to be the best version of myself. I put that pressure on myself to be the best version of Michael B. Jordan. And whoever that person is going to be, I’m still growing. I’m not even 30 yet.” He paused to slightly laugh at himself. “So I’m going to be a different person two years from now. I’m a different person now than I was a year ago: same core values, same person on the inside, but just growing to the next stage of my life of being a man. Will and Denzel have such phenomenal careers that anybody would be in awe of. [But] I think the time has changed. I think they came up in a different era, a different generation of film and cinema, which was molded and shaped by that as well. I think now, the timing, the platform is there for me to be able to be a version of what they had at their time.”
Jordan and Sylvester Stallone in Creed.
Courtesy Of Warner Bros.
Jordan’s heard plenty of times that Creed could catapult him into a superstar stratosphere. After Warner Bros. screened the film for journalists, the consensus was unanimous: the film— and most importantly, Jordan — was fantastic. Jordan offers “the best all-around performance of his young career,” reads a USA Today review.
Creed is Jordan’s first leading role in big feature film, a victory tantamount to Adonis nabbing his first taste of certifiable respect and getting dapped up by an opponent for being the real deal, not just a flash-in-the-pan wannabe boxer hoping to score off daddy’s name. Jordan has been working to get to this moment since making his debut in a 1999 episode of The Sopranos, before finally landing his big break on HBO’s The Wire in 2002 as teen drug dealer Wallace. Since then, he’s had roles in TV series like Parenthood and Friday Night Lights, been a part of ensembles in films like 2012’s Chronicle, and showed his dramatic chops in 2013’s Fruitvale Station, also directed by Creed’s Ryan Coogler.
Creed could also mean that Jordan has found a franchise that he can star in for years to come, an effort that didn’t exactly work out with the Fantastic Four reb