‘Sinners’ director Ryan Coogler on the day he ‘almost lost my mind’

Michael B. Jordan has starred in almost all of Ryan Coogler’s movies: 2013’s Fruitvale Station; 2015’s Rocky spinoff Creed; 2018’s Black Panther (and a brief appearance in its 2022 sequel, Wakanda Forever) — stories with no shortage of drama and action. So how did they up the ante for their latest, this year’s Sinners? How about a horror film…set in 1932 Mississippi…with vampires…and Jordan playing twins. That’ll do it.

“Every day was different. Every scene was different, ” Coogler tells Entertainment Weekly on The Awardist podcast, of figuring out how to film Jordan as brothers Smoke and Stack. “Watching the movie, there are certain scenes you wouldn’t think were difficult. Like…” he turns to Jordan, sitting next to him, “you remember the day I almost lost my mind — where you guys had to drive the car and get into the bushes? Pulling off that shot was f—ing crazy, because Mike’s driving, and we had to do a repeated pass of the car driving up and landing, them getting out of the car with the correct timing, and then interacting with the bush with the correct timing.”

But Smoke and Stack walk differently, drive the car differently, and get out of the car differently. “You can see the difference in performance,” Coogler says, “but also, because of the timing, they have to enter the bushes in a certain way.” The director and star created their own challenge, but “it looks good,” he concedes, laughing.

Navigating the physical and mental differences between the twins — WWI veterans who return to Mississippi after years working in Chicago (and stealing money from gangsters there to open a juke joint back home) — “became one and the same,” Jordan says. In scenes where both appear, he had to know exactly how his brother would deliver lines. “I would have to work with my twin double, Percy Bell, and direct him on what I was going to do, so I could have that performance to react off of when I was playing the first brother.”

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Whichever brother started the scene would set the “rules of blocking and coverage,” he explains, “because we couldn’t exist in the same space…. That was the thing that we found out in real time.”

It’s that spontaneity that Jordan says “excited” his fellow Sinners cast (including Delroy Lindo, Hailee Steinfeld, Jack O’Connell, Wunmi Mosaku, Omar Benson Miller, Jayme Lawson, and Li Jun Li) to join the project, particularly the way Coogler “writes and creates these worlds and brings things to life. The way he treats his actors — and the freedom that we have, and the space that he creates for us to take swings and to be vulnerable—is the dream.”

Sinners is available to stream on HBO Max. Listen to Coogler and Jordan's full interview on The Awardist podcast, below.

This story appears in a special Awardist 2026 Kickoff print issue of Entertainment Weekly.

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