Michael B. Jordan just awesomely championed diversity in superhero movies
We’ve been fangirling on Michael B. Jordan for YEARS now. From his early days as Wallace on “The Wire,” to his awesome stints on “Friday Night Lights” and “Parenthood,” to his star turn as Oscar Grant in “Fruitvale Station,” Jordan has always wowed us onscreen. We’re equally wowed with Jordan IRL, and super-impressed with the way he handled the internet trolls who complained that Jordan should not be playing Johnny Storm AKA “The Human Torch” in the upcoming “Fantastic Four” movie. Their troll reasoning? In the comics, Storm is blonde, blue-eyed, and white, and Jordan is a black actor.
In an essay for Entertainment Weekly entitled “Why I’m Torching the Color Line,” Jordan explains that the backlash “…used to bother me, but it doesn’t anymore. I can see everybody’s perspective, and I know I can’t ask the audience to forget 50 years of comic books. But the world is a little more diverse in 2015 than when the Fantastic Four comic first came out in 1961. Plus, if Stan Lee writes an email to my director saying, ‘You’re good. I’m okay with this,’ who am I to go against that?”
In his piece, Jordan goes onto explain that, while he obviously doesn’t LOVE the internet-hate, he’s willing to deal for the greater good.
“Sometimes you have to be the person who stands up and says, ‘I’ll be the one to shoulder all this hate. I’ll take the brunt for the next couple of generations.’ I put that responsibility on myself. People are always going to see each other in terms of race, but maybe in the future we won’t talk about it as much. Maybe, if I set an example, Hollywood will start considering more people of color in other prominent roles, and maybe we can reach the people who are stuck in the mindset that “it has to be true to the comic book.” Or maybe we have to reach past them.”
Jordan concludes with an awesome wake-up call for all his trolls out there.
“To the trolls on the Internet, I want to say: Get your head out of the computer. Go outside and walk around. Look at the people walking next to you. Look at your friends’ friends and who they’re interacting with. And just understand this is the world we live in. It’s okay to like it.”
“Fantastic Four” is set to drop August 7th and we could not be more excited to see Michael B. Jordan kick all the ass onscreen, even more so now, because he’s been doing such an amaze job of kicking butt IRL!
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