It seems there was an intimate connection between Chadwick Boseman and Michael B. Jordan’s careers long before they both starred in Marvel’s “Black Panther.”
In 2003, both actors played the character Reggie Montgomery on the now defunct ABC daytime hit “All My Children.”
On Wednesday, the two spoke to The Wrap about the weird coincidence and the controversial character.
Boseman was originally cast as Reggie, a character whom he described to The Wrap as “stereotypical” and one-dimensional. The actor, who was 26 at the time, felt conflicted about Reggie’s character and spoke to producers about his issues. He was fired, he told The Wrap, after just a week on the job. Jordan, who was then 16 and fresh off his role in the critically acclaimed HBO series “The Wire,” replaced him.
Boseman may have referred to his “All My Children” experience in a Howard University commencement speech last year, when he spoke about playing a role on an unidentified soap opera that he said was “wrapped up in assumptions about us as black folk.”
Neither actor appears to hold any hard feelings now, and they actually laughed at the mention of the show. During the Wrap interview, Jordan asked Boseman for his thoughts on the character.
“It’s one of those things where you get a role, and you don’t really know,” Boseman said. “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?’”
He added that he thought he could “change it and make it so it’s stereotypical on the page but not on the screen.” But he quickly realized that couldn’t be done on this particular show.
Boseman sees a silver lining now, he said: He believes the show took his criticisms into consideration and improved the character of Reggie.
“They said, ‘You are too much trouble,’ but they took my suggestions, or some of them,” he said. “And for me, honestly, that’s what this is about.”
Jordan agreed and connected Boseman’s actions to the superhero smash hit both men starred in last year.
“The work that we’re doing on ‘Black Panther’ is hopefully doing the same thing for the next group of actors that are coming up, just like our predecessors opened up doors and made things easier for us,” he said.
To read the entire interview, head over to The Wrap.