The horror genre has been experiencing a renaissance for years, and its showing no signs of slowing down. One of the best horror movies in recent memory was Ryan Coogler‘s Sinners, which has become an Oscar-nominated success. The vampire flick (which is streaming with an HBO Max subscription) earned Michael B. Jordan an Academy Award nomination for his duel role as Smoke and Stack, and he recently got real about how hot it was filming the project. And we’re talking some seriously high temperatures.
Sinners crushed at the box office, and it’s been embraced by both critics and audiences alike. Michel B. Jordan offered a stunning performance as movie’s twins, and in an interview with Vanity Fair he revealed some of the harsh realities to filming. Specifcally the first scene where Smoke and Stack are together and sharing a cigarette, as he put it:
It was 120 degrees. It was so goddamn, damn hot! It was probably the hottest day to shoot it. But it was a really ambitious shot that we’d been talking about all through preproduction, and one of the ones that we used for one of our camera tests—the technicality of continuity of hitting that mark, over and over and over again, and finding how to pass it.
Ouch. While being a movie star sounds glamorous, the reality of filming can be grueling. And Jordan playing two different characters in 120 degree weather is truly the thing of nightmares. I’ll never be able to look at that opening scene with The Twins the same way again.
In this interview the Black Panther star got honest, saying that Sinners was the hardest role(s) he’s had to play so far. Luckily those efforts paid off big time, as Ryan Coogler’s horror flick was acclaimed by critics and he’s gotten an Oscar nomination out of the deal.
Filming scenes opposite yourself sounds like a technical and emotional challenge, one that Jordan rose to. On top of filming sequences like Stack’s death scene, he also had to make sure that his characters’ twin connection was visible in their first scene. As the 39 year-old actor went on:
And I’m not gonna look at you because they’re twins—they’ve been doing this all their lives, so it’s secondhand nature. It took a long time but that shot symbolized a little bit of the egg multiplying: It starts out as Smoke being the oldest since he was the first, and then you see the twin as the egg kind of divides.
How cool is that? On top of introducing The Smokestack twins, there was also some cool symbolism that fans might not have noticed on first glance. This shows how methodically Coogler, Jordan, and the rest of the Sinners cast and crew approached the vampire flick. And it all resulted in a truly gorgeous moviegoing experience. Sinners’ ending seemingly left the door open for a sequel, but we’ll have to see if that ever happens.
Sinners is streaming now on HBO Max. We’ll find out if it manages to take home any Oscars when the Academy Awards air March 15th as part of the 2026 TV schedule.
