It’s no surprise that Michael B. Jordan is a massive anime fan. The multi-award winning actor has been dominating Hollywood for years, and after the release of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners in 2025, all eyes have been on the star to figure out what he’ll be doing next. In a recent interview with Vogue, Jordan spoke about his experience as an up-and-comer in the film industry before landing himself a spot as an A-list celebrity in 2019 following his role in Just Mercy.
While reminiscing, Jordan mentioned to Vogue how he would often sneak into the basement of the church he attended in New Jersey to watch episodes of Dragon Ball Z, and how his love for anime has persisted well into adulthood. The actor has spoken many times about how much he adores the medium, and even about how much he’d like to direct a live-action anime adaptation himself. What’s shocking, however, is that Jordan told Vogue that he’s considered retiring from acting entirely to focus on producing anime full time stating, “I might just quit it all and make anime the rest of my life.”
In addition to expressing his desire to leave the film industry to work on anime full time, Jordan mentioned that there’s already a few projects in the works that presumably hasn’t been announced yet, given how quickly he seemed to move on from the topic. That small detail invokes plenty of questions, with one of the most prevalent being what kind of anime Jordan could be working on, should he actually be trying to direct a series of his very own? The star has been very outspoken about his love for popular shonen series, especially Shonen Jump series like My Hero Academia, which he spoke fondly in a video with Vanity Fair showing a pivotal moment in the anime’s seventh season to other celebrities like Austin Butler from Elvis and Paul Mescal from Gladiator 2.
It’s clear the medium has had a big impact on Jordan, with him expressing to his colleagues that the emotional impact of the moment needed to be seen to be believed. Knowing just how important anime is to the star, fans can only imagine what Jordan would be able to make if he was given full creative control over a brand-new animated projects, especially with the right studio backing his ambitions.
Fans also know already that Jordan has been backing and performing up-and-coming projects through his own production company, Outlier Society, such as gen:LOCK, a sci-fi series where Jordan plays Julian Chase: a fish-out-of-water type in a dystopian future where a militaristic force called The Polity fight against a group of autocratic invaders called The Union. gen:LOCK was primarily produced and distributed through Rooster Teeth, the indie animation studio best known for their web series Red vs. Blue and Monty Oum’s RWBY.
As of writing, Jordan has yet to feature in a traditional anime series, but knowing that there could be some sort of top-secret anime project on the horizon helmed by the pop culture icon, that could very likely change in the future.
HT – Vogue
