When Michael B. Jordan, to his admitted shock, accepted the Actor Award for his role on Sinners in March 2026, he made sure to thank his mother, Donna Jordan, for helping him kickstart his acting career.
“Mom, thank you for driving me back and forth to New York when we didn’t have enough money to go through the Holland Tunnel, when we were looking for gas money, parking spaces,” he said as his mother proudly looked on from the audience.
Learn all about the Sinners actor’s early life and his parents below.
Michael is part Californian, part New Jerseyan
Michael, 39, was born in Santa Ana, California — his father, Michael A. Jordan, is from Los Angeles — but moved to Newark, New Jersey, where his mother is from, in 1982.
Though Michael primarily lives in Los Angeles now, he told HuffPost in 2013: “I was born in Orange County — in Santa Ana. My dad is from California. I was raised on the East Coast. My first two years were in California, but I claim East Coast. I’m sorry, I don’t rep California.”
© Getty ImagesHis acting career eventually helped his parents financially
Though when Michael first started acting — he made his screen debut as a teenager in 1999 — taking him to and from auditions could be somewhat of a financial strain, eventually, his acting career helped his father quit his job.
Michael’s father, who goes by Tony, worked nights as a supervisor at John F. Kennedy Airport when the family moved to New Jersey, but, once Michael was starring in The Wire, for its first season in 2002, Michael Sr. quit his job and started an independent catering business, beginning with lunches at his son’s junior high, a tuition-based private school called Chad, per Vanity Fair.
The outlet also reported that his mother Donna worked as a kind of social worker at Chad helping poor families navigate the system. Michael’s older sister Jamila Jordan-Theus and younger brother Khalid Jordan both also attended the school, and as of 2018, his parents served on the board of directors.
© Getty ImagesHe gets his artistic gene from his mom
Though neither of his parents ever worked in acting, Michael’s mom Donna was always involved in the arts. Growing up in Newark in the 1960s and 1970s, she studied painting at Newark Arts High, the first performing-arts public high school in America, where she also dabbled in ballet and theater.
She was also a young activist, who painted her bedroom the colors of the Pan-African flag, red, black, and green, in sympathy with the Committee for a Unified Newark, a Black-nationalist group founded by poet Amiri Baraka, and participated in a student walkout in Newark in 1970 in protest over the student murders at Kent State by the Ohio National Guard.
© Getty ImagesDonna helped her son get into acting
Aside from driving him to auditions, as he mentioned in his Actor Awards speech, Michael also shared of how his mom helped him go into acting, to HuffPost: “My mom got me started on lots of things and it just snowballed. They wanted to cater to my talents or find out the things that I liked or didn’t like. And I just started booking at a really young age; little small modeling jobs, to extra work, to background, to little commercials.”
“Then I booked The Cosby Show and The Sopranos and just kept going. I fell in love with it when I was probably around 14. It was the first time I really lost myself in a character and I was like, ‘Wow what is that feeling? Is that what acting is?'” he added, referring to his character Jamal in the 2001 movie Hard Ball with Diane Lane and Keanu Reeves.
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