New Jersey superstar Michael B. Jordan received a standing ovation Sunday as he walked to the stage to accept one of the most coveted awards on the road to the Oscars.
“I don’t even know where to begin,” a shocked Jordan said. “I wasn’t expecting this at all.”
He won the SAG Actor Award for outstanding performance by a male actor in a leading role for his double-barrel performance as twin brothers Smoke and Stack in Ryan Coogler’s sensational hit movie Sinners.
Jordan, who was born in California and grew up in Newark, accepted the award from presenter Viola Davis, whose ecstatic exclamations of joy heralded his win at the show, which streamed live on Netflix.
On his way to accept the award, the alum of Newark’s Arts High stopped for a few hugs. First, there was his co-star Delroy Lindo, then his mother Donna Jordan, followed by fellow nominee Ethan Hawke (Blue Moon), another actor with Jersey roots. Jordan received the honor at the 32nd Actor Awards, though it was the first time they were called that, since the show was formerly known as the Screen Actors Guild Awards, or SAG Awards.
In his acceptance speech, Jordan, 39, talked about this days as a child actor working toward SAG membership.
“I thought it was this club that I wanted to be in so bad,” he said.
“Those guys that were onstage with the awards and the nice suits, being in fancy places … that’s what I always wanted, and that kid from Newark, New Jersey is standing here right now.”
As a young teen, he played Wallace on HBOs The Wire and Reggie Montgomery on the soap opera All My Children before taking on the role of high school athlete Vince Howard in the NBC series Friday Night Lights.
“Mom, thank you for driving me back and forth to New York when we didn’t have enough money to go through the Holland Tunnel, when we were looking for gas money, parking spaces, when I went up there for my auditions,” Jordan continued in his acceptance speech. “Thank you.”
Jordan also thanked Coogler, who first directed him in Fruitvale Station, then Creed, Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever before helming Sinners. (Jordan made his own directorial debut in Creed III in 2023.) The actor said that working with Coogler allowed him to showcase his talents and be fearless, creating “a safe space for us to find the truth.”
Jordan took a moment to look at the crowd.
“Man, just being in this room right now with all these people who’ve seen me grow up in front of the camera and in these rooms,” he said. “I feel the love and support that you’ve always given me and encouraged me to go on and do my best, so I just want to say thank you. And yeah man, this is pretty cool.”
He also thanked the whole Sinners cast, but it wouldn’t be long before he was back onstage with those same actors accepting the Actor Award for outstanding cast in a motion picture.
From left: Sinners actors Delroy Lindo, Michael B. Jordan, Wunmi Mosaku and Miles Caton. Photo: Rich Polk/Shutterstock for The Actor Awards
Wins for Jordan and Sinners at the Actor Awards, considered an important precursor ceremony to the Academy Awards, have shifted the awards conversation. Jordan is nominated for best actor at the Oscars, Coogler is nominated for best director and Sinners is up for best picture. The movie’s 16 nominations set a new record.
It’s starting to look like Timothée Chalamet does not have that Marty Supreme Oscar in the bag, as some may have assumed at the start of awards season. Like Jordan, the Oscar would be his first. Chalamet, 30, won the lead actor SAG Award last year for his performance as a young Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown but ended up losing the Oscar to Adrien Brody in The Brutalist.
It was quite the winning weekend for Jordan. He accepted the awards for outstanding actor in a motion picture and entertainer of the year at the NAACP Image Awards Saturday. Jordan dedicated the actor award to his Black Panther co-star Chadwick Boseman, who was 43 when he died of cancer in 2020.
“Y’all really don’t understand how much this means to me,” he said, accepting the award. “I used to come here when I was a kid, when I was about 15 years old, sneaking in through the back as best I could. I always loved being here, it felt like a reunion of sorts, being from New Jersey and coming out here (to California) during the summers. This is a place where I always felt encouraged, always felt like I was being celebrated and nourished. You guys poured into me … Even when I was a kid, you told me it was OK to keep going because I felt seen here, I felt comfortable. I felt the love.”
“I love being Black,” Jordan said to close. “I love y’all.”
Sinners also won the NAACP Image Award for outstanding motion picture. The celebration of the movie and its cast came after the jarring moment at the BAFTA Film Awards Feb. 22 when Jordan and Lindo were onstage as presenters and heard a racial slur shouted in the audience. The source of the slur was John Davidson, an activist who has Tourette’s syndrome and whose shouting was involuntary. Davidson was at the BAFTAs because the film about his life, I Swear, was nominated. His shouting was not edited out of the BBC or E! broadcasts.
Lindo acknowledged public reaction to the incident—which included criticism of the networks for airing the slur and an outpouring of support for the Sinners actors—when presenting with Coogler at the NAACP Awards.
“I’d just like to officially say that I appreciate, we appreciate, all the support and the love that we have been shown in the aftermath of what happened last weekend,” Lindo said after the pair received a standing ovation. “It means a lot to us. It is an honor to be here amongst our people this evening, amongst so many people who’ve shown us such incredible support. And it’s a classic case of something that could’ve been very negative becoming very positive.”
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