Michael Bakari Jordan was born to Donna and Michael A. Jordan on February 9, 1987, in Santa Ana, California. Jordan’s family spent two years in Santa Ana, California, before relocating to Newark, New Jersey, where Jordan was raised. He played basketball and went to Newark Arts High School, where his mother worked. Jordan experienced harassment from other students at Newark Arts, including future radio presenter Lore’l, for wanting to be an actor and model.
Before choosing to pursue an acting career, Jordan worked as a child model for several businesses and organizations, including Modell’s Sporting Goods and Toys “R” Us. In 1999, he made his on-screen acting debut by making brief cameos in the episodes of Cosby and The Sopranos, which served as the foundation for his professional acting career. In 2001, he appeared in the Keanu Reeves-starring movie Hardball and received his first leading film role.
Jordan’s breakthrough role on television came in the first season of the HBO criminal drama series The Wire (2002) when he played Wallace. In the following years, he portrayed Reggie Montgomery on the ABC soap opera All My Children (2003–2006) and Vince Howard on the NBC sports drama series Friday Night Lights (2009–2011).
His other movies include Chronicle (2012), That Awkward Moment (2014), Fantastic Four (2015), and Just Mercy (2019), in which he played Bryan Stevenson. Additionally, he created and appeared in the HBO film Fahrenheit 451, for which he received a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Television Movie.
In 2020 and 2023, Time magazine included Jordan among the top 100 global influencers. He was chosen People’s Sexiest Man Alive in 2020, and The New York Times ranked him 15th on their list of the 25 finest actors of the 20th century. He is also the co-owner of AFC Bournemouth of the English Premier League.
He is to reunite with director Ryan Coogler for the fourth time in Wrong Answer, a movie based on the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal. His production business, Outlier Society, has a first-look agreement with Amazon and is also working on the HBO Max series Val-Zod, which will feature a Black Superman from DC Comics.
Jordan produced and featured alongside Will Smith in “I Am Legend sequel”.
As of 2018, he lives with his parents in a house he bought in Sherman Oaks,
