From Teen ‘All My Children’ Star to ‘Sinners’ Oscar Nominee: A Look at Michael B. Jordan’s Early Days in Soaps
The actor's path to fame started on daytime TV—and the story involves Chadwick Boseman and Amanda Seyfried
The ’30s-set supernatural drama Sinners was one of last year’s most critically and commercially successful films, and it set a record by earning 16 Oscar nominations—the most of any film in the Academy Awards’ nearly 100-year history. Sinners is anchored by a powerhouse performance from Michael B. Jordan, who plays the dual role of Smoke and Stack, twins who open a juke joint in Mississippi, only to be confronted by evil forces. The film has earned the star his first Best Actor Oscar nomination.
Jordan has been acting since 1999, and first earned attention for playing a teenage drug dealer in the debut season of The Wire in 2002. The following year, he joined the cast of All My Children in the role of another troubled teen, Reggie Montgomery, the adopted son of Erica Kane (Susan Lucci) and Jackson Montgomery (Walt Willey), and became a soap star at 16. Read on to discover how Jordan’s soap opera days connected the charismatic actor with future Marvel costar Chadwick Boseman, gave him his first onscreen kiss with Amanda Seyfried and built the work ethic that made him an A-lister.
‘All My Children’ brought Michael B. Jordan and Chadwick Boseman together 15 years before ‘Black Panther’
Michael B. Jordan was part of the All My Children cast from 2003 to 2006, but he wasn’t the first choice for the role of Reggie. Originally, the late Chadwick Boseman played Reggie, but he bravely spoke up when he felt the role relied on Black stereotypes. Producers fired him after just a week, and Jordan was quickly brought in to replace him.
In a joint interview with The Wrap, Boseman said that after he got the part, “I remember going home and thinking, ‘Do I say something to them about this? Do I just do it?’ And I couldn’t just do it. I had to voice my opinions and put my stamp on it. And the good thing about it was, it changed it a little bit for him.” Jordan stepped into the rewritten role and made it his own, later acknowledging how Boseman had paved the way for him, responding, “I’m younger than Chad, and I was coming into All My Children fresh off The Wire—wide open, still learning. 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.”
15 years after Boseman was replaced by Jordan on All My Children, the two actors shared the screen in the Marvel blockbuster Black Panther. The film was directed by Ryan Coogler, who gave Jordan his cinematic breakthrough in the 2013 film Fruitvale Station. Coogler and Jordan continued their collaboration with Creed (2015) and Sinners. Following Boseman’s untimely passing from colon cancer at 43 in 2020, Jordan said that the actor had been a source of support and inspiration since All My Children and likened him to a big brother.
Michael B. Jordan and Amanda Seyfried’s sweet ‘All My Children’ romance
While on All My Children, Jordan crossed paths with another future star (and Oscar nominee, for Mank in 2021), Amanda Seyfried. The actress, who shared an adorable throwback photo of her and Jordan on the soap set on Instagram, got her start on As the World Turns and joined the cast of All My Children in 2003, the same year as Jordan. She played Joni Stafford, a rebellious rich girl who met Reggie when they were both doing community service work. The characters developed a romantic connection, but it was cut short when Seyfried landed her scene-stealing role in the 2004 teen comedy Mean Girls.
In a recent W magazine interview, Seyfried looked back fondly on her soap days, recalling, “My first onscreen kiss was with Michael B. Jordan. He was Reggie and I was Joni on All My Children. Our characters met, and we had feelings for each other. We were so young. I think he was 15, and I was 16 or 17. Michael was always really good. It’s interesting to think back that long ago and to see that we’re both still as passionate as ever about what we do as actors. I like that trajectory.”
How ‘All My Children’ surprised Michael B. Jordan—and opened unexpected doors
As a soap star turned Oscar nominee, Jordan joins the ranks of a small but impressive group of nominated actors who also got their start in daytime drama, including Tommy Lee Jones, Morgan Freeman, Demi Moore and Julianne Moore. Jordan said that though he felt aspects of Reggie’s character were cliché, he learned a lot from playing him, telling GQ, “I knew that it was a chess move. You work on a show like All My Children—we know what it is, but you’re still able to grow outside of it. It’s the perfect situation. I learned, I grew as an actor, I worked with professionals, I got paid.”
Long after his soap opera days, Jordan revealed that he was surprised to see just how much All My Children impacted his career. As he put it to People, “I never knew how many casting directors and executives in Hollywood would tell me, ‘Oh man, my wife really loves you.’ Or like, ‘Oh, she watches you all the time on the stories . . . Come in for this and read for that.’ It opened up so many doors in the most unexpected places for me, and that was . . . I think looking back at it, that was something that definitely caught me off guard. I didn’t expect that one. So that and The Wire were the two projects that really opened up a lot of doors for me in that sense.”
In the People interview, Jordan also credited All My Children with making him a more dedicated performer while his peers were still in high school, observing, “I think soap operas, we’re doing a hundred-plus pages a day . . . The grind of that definitely gave me a built-in work ethic and helped me refine that discipline at an early age,” and he’s said that he learned a lot from “watching Susan Lucci day in and day out.”
All My Children fans instantly picked up on Jordan’s prodigious talents. “Soap opera fans take a lot of pride in the feeling of ‘We knew them back then. We could tell that person was going to be big,’” says Mara Levinsky, Executive Editor at Soap Opera Digest (one of Woman’s World’s sister sites). “If you watched Michael B. Jordan on All My Children, you knew.” Over 20 years after soap enthusiasts first recognized Jordan, the actor is one of Hollywood’s brightest stars, and the accolades he’s received are well-deserved.
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