How Michael B. Jordan found the 'subtle differences' in 'Sinners'' identical twins

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While an excited crowd of white, Black, old and young people lined up outside a movie theater on the Warner Bros.lot recently to see “Sinners,” Michael B.

Jordan quietly slipped into a back room and posed for photographs.Dressed in an auburn zipper sweater, he said not a word, expertly tilting his head this way, that way, profile, straight-ahead.

Then he walked upstairs to a conference room, sat at the end of a long table and explained how he reunited with Ryan Coogler to play charismatic twins in the writer-director’s blues-drenched vampire blockbuster.Arms resting on the table, Jordan leaned in and told The Envelope, “I actually called Ryan to pitch him a project and he was [like], ‘That sounds great, how ’bout this one?’ Like, ‘I’ll raise you a pitch.’ Then he told me about ‘Sinners.’ It sounded fantastic, but he left out the vampires at first and left out the identical twins, and just kind of dropped those things along the way.I was like, ‘You want me to play identical twins? You could have led with that!’ But I’m a self-motivator.

You give me a mission, give me a goal and I’m going to reach it.”Jordan’s determination to deliver the goods for Coogler took root at a Starbucks on Ventura Boulevard 13 years ago.Coogler, a preternaturally confident USC film student, wrote “Fruitvale Station” — based on the 2009 killing of 22-year-old Oscar Grant by Bay Area Rapid Transit police — expressly for Jordan, even though they’d never met.

“We hit it off big time right out the gate, talking about cartoons, sports,” Jordan recalled.“We both had something to prove.”Coogler and Jordan did in fact prove their worth with “Fruitvale Station,” which won the Sundance Film Festival grand jury prize and audience award upon its premiere in 2013.

Jordan then bulked up to star in the Coogler-directed boxing movie “Creed,” followed by Ma...