Michael B. Jordan went to therapy to help him “decompress” after playing the villain in 2018’s Black Panther.

The Sinners actor revealed on CBS Sunday Morning that he struggled to shake off the character of Erik Killmonger, the main adversary to Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa, and turned to therapy for help.

“After the movie, it kind of stuck with me for a bit,” he said. “Went to therapy, talked about it, found a way to kind of just decompress. And I think at that point, I was still learning that I needed to decompress from a character. You know, there’s no blueprint to this.”

Jordan continued, “Acting is a solo journey a lot of times. Auditioning by yourself, practising by yourself. There’s a lot of preparation and the experience and the journey. So learning as I went, I (realised) that, ‘Oh man, I still got a little something on me I need to get off.’ You know, talking is really important.”

The Creed actor admitted that he fully immersed himself in the role and “isolated” himself from his loved ones to get into the headspace of Erik in the weeks leading up to production.

“Erik didn’t really know a lot of love. I think Erik didn’t experience that,” Jordan explained. “He had a lot of betrayal, a lot of failed systems around him that shaped him and his anger and his frustration. And looking at history and how it would seem to always repeat itself, and how was he going to break that cycle.”

Black Panther was a massive critical and commercial success and won three Oscars. A sequel, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, was released in 2022 and writer-director Ryan Coogler is currently working on a third film.

Black Panther marked Jordan and Coogler’s third collaboration after Fruitvale Station and Creed. They most recently teamed up for the fourth time for the 2025 horror movie Sinners.

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