NEED TO KNOW
Michael B. Jordan put in the work to play twins in Sinners.
The 38-year-old actor sat down with the movie’s writer-director Ryan Coogler for a featurette titled “Thicker Than Blood: Becoming the Smokestack Twins,” available with Sinners’ upcoming home release — and PEOPLE has an exclusive sneak peek.
In the vampire thriller — Jordan’s fifth feature-film collaboration with Coogler, 39, beginning with 2013’s Fruitvale Station — he has dual roles as Smoke and Stack, twins in 1930s Mississippi.
“There’s a notoriety identical twins have in their neighborhoods,” Coogler says in the featurette, drawing from his own real-life experiences with a set of twins he knows well: Noah and Logan Miller, whom he consulted creatively for Sinners.
“They were able to work with Michael to get into the psychology of who [Smoke and Stack] are,” the filmmaker adds.
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Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
“What we kind of understood amongst identical twins is one is more dominant in certain areas than the other,” Jordan says. “So finding out those little details was a lot of fun and very informing on just a process [level].”
“They physical — they stood different, they walked different,” he continues. “Smoke, he wore his trauma differently; he kinda closed up a bit.”
“And Stack was a lot lighter. He smiled through his pain, he smiled through his trauma,” the Creed III director adds. “So just getting into all that work really helped me feel confident and prepared.”
In Sinners, Smoke and Stack return to their hometown hoping to leave behind their troubled past by opening a juke joint. They soon find out, however, that a threat is encroaching on the area: invading vampires who are out for blood.
The cast also includes Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, Jack O’Connell, Wunmi Mosaku, Jayme Lawson, Omar Miller, Li Jun Li and Delroy Lindo.
Of how he pulled off portraying the identical-twin connection onscreen with himself as his own scene partner, Jordan told PEOPLE in April, “I’ve got a brother that I’m extremely tight with and close and love a lot, and best friends that are like brothers.”
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Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
The Black Panther star explained his process involved “imagining those dynamics and incorporating that into the body double that I was acting opposite, and premeditating those choices.”
“Because once I do one, I have to go on the other side and play the other brother and I’m already going against a performance that I already did before,” Jordan added.
Coogler told PEOPLE of the real-life Miller twins, “They gave us a lot of perspective on what it’s like to be an identical twin and that bond that they have. Since I’ve known these guys, they’ve shared one cell phone. So you’d call and you don’t know which one was going to answer the phone but you knew the other one was always going to be right there.”
Sinners is out on Digital Tuesday, June 3, and 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD on July 8.
