Before going toe-to-toe in Wakanda, Chadwick Boseman and Michael B. Jordan‘s paths almost crossed in Pine Valley.
All My Children casting director Judy Blye Wilson recently recalled hiring Jordan to play Reggie Montgomery on the ABC soap opera back in 2003 after Boseman was fired from the role.
“I did cast Boseman, who became very famous, as we all know. And he was only on the show for just a week, because they really wanted the character to be about 16, 15 years old,” said Wilson at the 92Y, according to People.
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“[Boseman] had just come out of Juilliard. He was a magnificent actor to audition. And long story short, they fired him,” she added. “And then I put in Michael B. Jordan, who became just as famous. And he was only about 15 at that time. Now, I could go on and on, but I think I don’t want to do that.”
In 2020, the late Boseman’s longtime agent Michael Green claimed that the actor was fired from the soap after objecting to the writers “perpetuating the stereotypes” of Reggie’s mother being a crackhead and his father having left.
Before Boseman died at age 43 in 2020 from stage III colon cancer, he reflected on playing Reggie in a 2019 conversation with Jordan for The Wrap.
“It’s one of those things where you get a role, and you don’t really know,” he explained. “When I got it, I was like, ‘This is not part of my manifesto. This is not part of what I want to do. How can I make it work?’ Because with a soap opera, you don’t know the full scope of what’s gonna happen — you don’t know where they’re gonna take the character, because they don’t always know where the character is going. And because of that, there’s possibly room for me to adjust this and change it and make it so it’s stereotypical on the page but not on the screen.”
After replacing Boseman on All My Children, Jordan played the role from 2003 to 2006. The pair eventually worked together on 2018’s Black Panther, in which Boseman played the titular MCU hero and Jordan portrayed villainous Erik Killmonger.
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