Remember when Jared Leto sent his castmates a dead pig because he’s, like, so method and Viola Davis almost pepper sprayed his ass? Or when Charlie Hunnam ghosted his girlfriend for months to ‘get into character’? Turns out, these self-indulgent Very Serious Actors could have just kept a diary and not f-cked with the emotional well-being of the people around them.
Michael Bae Jordan was on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert this week and revealed that he kept a diary of Erik Killmonger’s thoughts to help him get into character for Black Panther. Well, isn’t that a healthy outlet of artistic expression! We stan a compassionate and introspective man.
"I have journals, or diaries, or whatever, for every character that I have from the earliest memory up until the first page of the script.”
For Killmonger, those memories were “dark”, according to MBJ.
"Not having his mom growing up, in and out of the system, foster care, foster homes and whatnot. It's a lot of dark stuff that's probably not right for television. But it was deep, and it allowed me to kind of go to that place right before a scene. It allowed me to lock in."
Erik Killmonger is greatest villain in the MCU (come at me thicc Thanos fans) and one of the reasons he is so great is because of his depth. Black Panther never explicitly reveals what happens to Killmonger’s mother but Ryan Coogler explained that she passed away in prison. That is dark.
Michael Bae Jordan also shared that he writes diaries for his other characters too. I don’t care to read the thoughts of Human Torch but I’d read the inner ramblings of Adonis Creed any day. If he wrote a diary during Fruitvale Station, I wouldn’t get two words in before sobbing my face off. I would, however, make it through pages of Vince complaining about Coach Taylor. How do we get MBJ to release these diaries to the public? Fine, I’ll wait until we’re married and he shares them with me in the confines of our loving and trusting union.
You can watch the rest of Michael Bae Jordan’s appearance on Colbert below. The fit of this sweater he’s wearing is going to be a problem for my productivity for the rest of the day.
