Michael B. Jordan Doubles Down in Twin Role for Vampire Film 'Sinners'

Acting can be challenging enough in one role. But for his latest film, Michael B. Jordan pulls double duty, playing twins Smoke and Stack in Ryan Coogler’s vampire thriller, Sinners, out April 18.

“It was pretty challenging, but a lot of fun as well, you know,” Jordan said in an interview with Extra, noting that the challenge was to differentiate the twins.

“How they walk and how they talk and the mannerisms and how they hold their body, and, you know, the different tics that they both had, and, you know, how they care deeply for their significant others and their friends and how they wanted to protect everybody,” he explained.

In Sinners, twin brothers Smoke and Stack return to their hometown to get a fresh start on their troubled lives, only to discover that an even greater evil is waiting to welcome them back.

Jordan said he was “hyped” to see two versions of himself on the big screen. “I think I yelled out an audible ‘woo.’ First time I saw it was last night… and it was a shot that we spent a lot of time trying to get, so the technicality of them passing the cigarette back and forth and lighting it, you know, and smoking it, you know, even without looking at times, you know, was an extreme challenge.”

Coogler and Jordan have previously teamed for the films Black Panther, Creed, and Fruitvale Station. That decade-long collaboration was a key part of Jordan’s growth as an actor, he said.

“I feel like, at a time, earlier in my career when I was figuring out what type of actor I wanted to be…never opened a movie before, never been a lead of a film before, so I was searching for that. Ryan was the first director to believe in that… and tell me I was a movie star and believed it and made me believe it, you know, and we went out and we did it,” Jordan explained.

That close collaboration made it easier for Jordan to take on a new genre.

“I loved it. I mean, it was multiple genres for me, you know, because the film slips in a lot of different ones and this is me, kind of like baring as much of myself as I could, you know, to the theatrical audience,” he said.

Watch the interview below: