The actor is opening up about the intense grief he felt after losing his close friend, Chadwick Boseman.
Michael B. Jordan is opening up about the intense grief he felt after losing his close friend, Chadwick Boseman, in August. The 34-year-old actor is featured in Vanity Fair's s 27th Annual Hollywood Issue and talks about what their friendship meant to him.
Boseman died after a four-year battle with colon cancer, which he kept private. Jordan and Boseman were close, having starred in Black Panther together, and before that, Jordan had taken over Boseman's role on the soap opera All My Children. When Jordan was asked by the magazine about what made him cry the hardest this past year, he said that it was Boseman's death.
"Our relationship was a very personal one and had a lot of great moments -- some that I couldn't fully appreciate and fully understand until now," he said. "I wish I had more time to have our relationship evolve, and grow, and become closer and stronger. We got a concentrated dose of Chadwick. He did more in his 43 years of life than most people have done in a lifetime. And he was here for the time he was supposed to be here, and he had his impact, and his legacy. That was clear with the abundance of love that he has gotten from people all over the world."
"There are generations of kids coming up that look to him," he continued. "It's incredible. And losing him was…Yeah, man, it hurt. It hurt a lot. That's probably what made me cry the most this year."
Jordan also reflected on Boseman keeping his cancer battle private as he continued to work, and praised the late actor's now widow, Taylor Simone Ledward.
"He's an incredible person," Jordan said. His family and his wife are so strong. The people that he had around him are truly special people. To keep something like this quiet for so long -- our town is nearly impossible to do something like that in. It speaks to the type of person he was, to work as hard as he did into his last moments. It's truly incredible."
Back in 2018, ET spoke with both Boseman and Jordan about Black Panther, and Boseman talked about their close bond.
"We're all competitive, and I think that's where the respect is," Boseman shared at the time. "There's a great group of Black actors… We all love each other's work and respect each other, and it was important for Michael and I to buy into being in this movie together."
"I knew we're tied together to a certain degree, forever," Boseman also said of their characters in the film, T'Challa and Erik "Killmonger" Stevens. "It's like Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, because these two characters are essentially two sides of the same coin."
In an Instagram post in August, Jordan said he wished he had more time with Boseman and reflected on their All My Children bond. Boseman was cast to play Reggie Porter on the popular soap opera in 2003 and had the role for a week, but was cut after addressing his concerns regarding what he felt was the role's more racially stereotypical characteristics. Producers took some notes to heart with a rewrite of the role, and then cast a then 16-year-old Jordan, who had just come off his time on The Wire.
"One of the last times we spoke, you said we were forever linked, and now the truth of that means more to me than ever," Jordan shared. "Since nearly the beginning of my career, starting with All My Children when I was 16 years old you paved the way for me. You showed me how to be better, honor purpose, and create legacy. And whether you’ve known it or not…I’ve been watching, learning and constantly motivated by your greatness."
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