CULTURE

Michael B. Jordan Knows You’re Trying to Take His Picture

And he’d prefer to just take the perfect selfie with you.


Celebrities Visit SiriusXM - February 13, 2018
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Michael B. Jordan, professional thirst trap, has a “spidey sense.” That is, he can tell, from across a crowded restaurant, if a fan is trying to take his photo. It doesn’t matter how chill she—because it seems like it’s probably usually a she, though we don’t want to be normative about it—thinks she’s being, how surreptitiously she angles her phone toward him; he can tell. At least, that’s how the Black Panther and Creed actor describes things in The New York Times’ new profile: “I’ve just got to get comfortable with that being my life now,” he tells the writer Kyle Buchanan.

But this doesn’t mean that Jordan has a problem interacting with fans—in fact, he seems almost to relish it (in a way he certainly doesn’t relish, or even acknowledge, dating). “Mike’s the type that wants to interact with fans,” the Creed II director Steven Caple Jr. tells W. He’s helped a thirsty fan replace her retainer after she broke it while watching him play Erik Killmonger in Black Panther; his DMs are open and he might take you up on the offer if you volunteer to buy him a smoothie; and he brought a high-schooler to the set of Creed II after he learned she had taken a cardboard cutout of him to prom. (Weird, but okay.)

He’s even liable to give fans the benefit of the doubt. “I don’t feel like it’s just, ‘You’re famous, let me get a picture,’” Jordan tells The New York Times. “I feel like they really connect with what I’m doing, and they’ve been a part of things I’ve done in the past. It’s not just because I’m hot right now.”

So it might make him more inclined to be extra-generous in his fan interactions. But here’s the thing: Michael B. Jordan gets that you love his work. He just wants you to delete the bad photo you took from across the restaurant, alright? At the end of the profile, Jordan summons a woman he had spotted earlier trying to take his photo, and he offers her and her friends the selfie of their fantasies. “I promise this is going to be good,” he says. He takes the photo himself; he even makes sure they’ve got proper lighting. But he has one request: “This means you’ve gotta delete the other ones you took of me in the back, is that cool?” Honestly, seems like a pretty fair trade.