When Michael B. Jordan’s name was announced as a Best Actor Oscar nominee for his dual performance in Sinners, the people who taught him, coached him and grew up alongside him in Newark, New Jersey felt something closer to confirmation than surprise. For those who watched him come up at Newark Arts High School, the trajectory that led to Hollywood’s most celebrated stage was visible long before the cameras and credits caught up to it.
Jordan, 39, plays twin brothers Elijah Smoke Moore and Elias Stack Moore in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, a performance that earned him his first Academy Award nomination. The 98th Oscar ceremony airs live on ABC and Hulu on March 15 starting at 7 p.m. ET and four people from Jordan’s formative years spoke to PEOPLE about the teenager they remember as someone already operating at a different level than his peers.
His drama teacher saw a future king in the making
Carl Gonzalez, who taught Jordan drama at Newark Arts High School, first encountered his future star pupil when Jordan was a junior already a working actor with a role on HBO’s The Wire and a scheduling challenge that required teachers and administrators to build a customized academic plan around his filming commitments.
What struck Gonzalez most was not the early career but the mindset behind it. Jordan did not coast on the work he was already doing. He came to his teacher with questions about how to improve at auditions and asked for material to practice with. He was empathetic toward fellow students, deeply committed to family and, in Gonzalez’s assessment, carrying a maturity that most adults take years to develop.
One moment from those years remains vivid for Gonzalez. Jordan became captivated by a monologue from Camelot that explored themes of leadership, responsibility and power subjects that resonated with something in him even as a teenager. Gonzalez sees that connection differently now. The qualities King Arthur embodied in that text, he suggests, are the same qualities Jordan has brought to every room he has entered since.
Gonzalez also draws a direct line between Jordan’s ascent and his ongoing creative partnership with director Ryan Coogler, which has produced Fruitvale Station, the Creed franchise and now Sinners. The relationship, he says, may ultimately belong in the same conversation as the most celebrated actor-director collaborations in film history.
His basketball coach recognized a leader before the awards arrived
Kennis Fairfax, who coached Jordan on the basketball court at Newark Arts High School, describes a teenager who brought the same discipline to the gym that he brought to every other dimension of his life. Jordan was not the loudest presence in a room, Fairfax recalls, but the quality of his attention and the consistency of his effort made him someone others naturally oriented toward.
Fairfax attributes part of Jordan’s foundation to the values his family instilled in him. The coach’s long-standing belief that success at home precedes success anywhere else applied to Jordan as clearly as to anyone he has worked with. Jordan, Fairfax says, always kept that base intact. It is the same foundation that has held across a career that has taken him from a high school basement classroom to the Academy Awards stage.
Roger León watched a teenager who already understood his purpose
Roger León, now superintendent of Newark Public Schools, first encountered Jordan when he was principal of University High School in Newark, neighboring the school Jordan attended. What León observed in the future actor was a quality he describes as rare at any age: a clear understanding of one’s own role in a given situation and a full commitment to fulfilling it.
Jordan’s passion for basketball and his passion for acting, León says, were not competing interests but parallel expressions of the same underlying drive. Both revealed someone who already knew what it meant to give everything to an assignment a quality that León believes the Oscar nomination now formally validates.
A peer who became a friend remembers the human being behind the star
Prophet Kates, a former Newark Arts High School basketball player whom Jordan mentored during their overlapping years at the school, offers the perspective of someone who watched Jordan’s early success from the inside. Despite the growing recognition that came with The Wire Jordan remained simply Mike to those around him no elevated sense of self, no distance from the people he had grown up alongside.
The clearest window into Jordan’s character, for Kates, came not during a public moment but a private one. When Kates’ father suffered a stroke and later died in 2016, Jordan reached out personally to check in. The gesture required nothing from Jordan professionally and meant everything to Kates personally. It revealed, Kates says, that the person the world now sees accepting awards and earning nominations is the same person who was looking out for people in Newark long before anyone outside the city knew his name.
Michael returned to where it started
Years after achieving major success, Jordan came back to Newark Arts High School and sat down with Gonzalez in the same basement classroom where he had once studied. He paid for students to attend the opening of Creed. He asked how he could help the next generation find their way.
For Gonzalez, those gestures reflect the same quality that distinguished Jordan as a student a genuine investment in other people that was never performative and never contingent on what he stood to gain from it. The drama teacher who helped him shape his early craft believes the best chapters are still ahead. The Oscar nomination, in his framing, is not an arrival. It is a marker on a journey that is still very much underway.
