To be young, Black and successful — and disruptive — in this industry, there’s a certain navigation to get to the place I need to get to. This is the… - Michael B. Jordan

For all the success that I’ve had, there’s going to be negative reactions and opinions thrown at me. That just comes with it. When you’re younger, you’re just frustrated, but when you start to realize that this is what it is, you start to understand. I’m never going to make everybody happy. People are always going to have their opinions about me. People can make up something completely false that has no fucking substance or anything, and there’s going to be 100,000 people that are going to believe it and that’s going to be their opinion of me. I can’t do anything about that, and I’ve just got to accept that and keep moving in my purpose. People that know me know my heart. But people that know me for my work . . . they know what I allow them to know. The fact that I’ve been so closed off about a lot of parts of my life was a personal choice. As I’ve gotten older and a little more mature and comfortable in my own skin, I’ve become less concerned about it.

I’m playing to be autonomous. That’s liberation, because you’re really controlling your own destiny, and it gives you the freedom to make an impact where you see fit. It’s like, ‘All right, I can do what I need to do, when I need to do it, and there’s no asking.

There are roles that I passed on that I knew I didn’t have enough life experience to play. I was like, ‘What can I pull from?’. But I finally found what love was.