Fun fact: Chadwick Boseman and Michael B. Jordan once played the same character on soap opera All My Children.
In an interview with The Wrap, the Black Panther co-stars talk about their time on the show with Boseman revealing that he was fired for objecting to stereotypical parts of the character.
In 2003, the pair played Reggie Montgomery, a troubled teen portrayed as a stereotypical thug, to which Boseman objected.
“It’s one of those things where you get a role, and you don’t really know,” Boseman recalled. “When I got it, I was like, ‘This is not part of my manifesto. This is not part of what I want to do. How can I make it work?’ Because with a soap opera, you don’t know the full scope of what’s gonna happen — you don’t know where they’re gonna take the character, because they don’t always know where the character is going.”
He continued, “Because of that, there’s possibly room for me to adjust this and change it and make it so it’s stereotypical on the page, but not on the screen.”
But Boseman was later fired for speaking out about the part, and Jordan stepped in to fill the role.
The two acknowledge that it was Boseman’s concerns that got the show to change the character.
“I’m younger than Chad, and I was coming into All My Children fresh off The Wire — wide open, still learning,” Jordan said. “I was playing this role not knowing that a lot of the things I was going through were because of what he’d already done for me.”
“It’s hard to speak in the moment about how things we do can affect other people,” he added. “But this is a pure example, right here on the spot — we ain’t never talked about this before a day in our lives — to understand how what people do now can directly affect what other people do in the future.”
Amen.
