Michael B. Jordan knows he's lucky to have gotten his start on "The Wire," the hit HBO series that's often hailed as one of television's greatest dramas. And so it was with a heavy heart that he first took the the news of Wallace, his beloved character on the show, getting killed off.
"Each script that I got, I'd just be flipping through the pages to see if my name was in the back," he recalled in a HuffPost Live interview on Tuesday. "It was like okay, now I can read it, because people were dropping like flies. Like nobody was safe on that show."
Including, of course, Jordan himself. "I got that dreadful knock on my trailer," he said, "and ['The Wire' creator and writer] David Simon was like, 'Look, I love you. Everybody loves you. But that's why we gotta kill you.' And yeah, Wallace was gone."
Interestingly, Jordan credits his critically-lauded "Wire" performance to his lack of acting experience at the time.
"I was really young and raw," he said. "I can't really take credit for that -- that was something that was just me at that time in my life. I was able to kind of like, do that. I didn't have any training, I didn't go to class or anything like that."
While the 27-year-old never expected "The Wire's" exorbitant success -- the show was actually slated to be cancelled after the first season -- he says the series has informed the caliber of projects he now seeks out.
"The writing on that show was incredible. I was really lucky," he said. "[The show] set an extremely high bar. It's going to be hard to ever reach that level, but I want to get something close."
Watch the rest of Michael B. Jordan's conversation with HuffPost Live here.
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