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Jane Pauley is off this weekend. I'm Lee Callan. And this is Sunday morning. It was one year ago this month. That fires ravaged parts of Los Angeles, bringing devastation and drastic change to the landscape.
and of course to the people who call LA home. Jonathan Vigliati will offer us a status report. on a year's worth of recovery. As residents begin to reframe their homes, They're also reframing what the fires that took so much could give. I've never been more grateful.
to be alive. I've never been more grateful for my community. I've never been more grateful for the attention from people about our little town and this story and We feel very fortunate. Communities and their comebacks. Ahead.
on Sunday morning. The pit was the surprise television hit of 2025. Garnering multiple Emmys, including one for star Noel Wiley as Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series. A veteran of TV's ER, Wiley is certainly no stranger to hospital dramas. And as our Dr.
John Lapuc shares, he's at the center of everything. on the pit.
Okay, everybody, listen up. Noah Wiley is not only starring in the pit. Two cameras, they mark. D-BERG. He's also an executive producer, writer, and director.
Is this about control? Yes, I'm wearing a lot of hats, but it's only 'cause I'm so f ⁇ ing Excited to be here and I don't want to give it up. We have our chairs. We go back to the emergency room with Noah Wiley. Later on Sunday morning.
His films have grossed billions around the world, making actor Michael B. Jordan one of Hollywood's most bankable stars. His latest movie, Centers, was not only a box office smash, but also a critical one. earning him a Golden Globe nomination. This morning.
He talks with our Tracy Smith. Enter the fight! Before he became a global superstar, Michael B. Jordan had to fight a few battles, even with his own name. Was the name Michael Jordan a problem?
Big time. I got teased so much to the point where I almost changed my name. But his latest film could be another step toward his own immortality. Say we pay you $40 a night and all the beer that you can drink. After that, no strings.
Michael B. Jordan coming up on Sunday morning. Yeah. MoRacca explores the life and times of one of New York City's legendary former mayors, Fiorello LaGordia. who the city's new mayor, Zoron Mandani, has called the greatest in history.
And Dora O'Donnell gets tips for a happy and healthy life from Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel. All that and more on this first Sunday morning of the New Year. january fourth, twenty twenty six. We'll be back in a moment.
Hmm. Hmm. Just about a year ago, a series of destructive fires wreaked havoc across parts of Los Angeles, destroying neighborhoods, displacing tens of thousands. and casting a pall over the city, Jonathan Vigliotti assesses the recovery effort. One year later, Metallic grinding marks the start of the day as contractors report to work in Pacific Palisades and Altadena.
One year after the fire, construction has begun on just about 500 of the more than 16,000 structures lost, with only a few homes fully rebuilt. What are you looking forward to most in this home? Sitting right here in the lounge. Karen Martinez is one of the lucky ones, navigating the complex web of permits, insurance payouts, and rising construction costs. She started rebuilding her home in Malibu in October.
Was it an easy decision for you to say, let's break ground again? There were some moments in the very beginning where I was thinking about Just selling the lot and moving on, you know, I finally thought, okay, I got to do this. I have to educate all my neighbors on how to. rebuild and how to build back better.
So I'm going to put my hand right here. For Martinez, that means using fire-resistant materials. It's just 3,000 to 3,700 degrees, and she'll never move her hand. a concrete composite that's cheaper than wood. the fires here.
to me If I can live in a home that's not going to burn, it's it's paradise. We're here talking, you can't help but hear the construction that's going on. Is that the sound of progress to you? Yes, yeah, yeah. Yeah, love that sound.
Despite the sights and sounds of a comeback, 80% of fire survivors remain displaced. including chef Tyler Wells. The night of the fires, he was tending a different kind of flame, the hearth, at his Altadena restaurant, Bernie, when he realized he had lost his home. to look back on it and think about what that moment was like is so surreal because It just doesn't seem possible, but we were still here. cooking for people and taking care of people.
His restaurant sustained only minor damage. Neighboring buildings were destroyed. What goes on your mind? when you arrive to it still standing. Oh man.
A lot. A lot, which is One is probably survivor's guilt. Like why is this still here? And then truthfully, like What what do I do with a restaurant in the middle of a disaster zone. This was a neighborhood restaurant, it always has been, and now there's no neighborhood.
No neighborhood, but after months of contemplation, he reopened the restaurant, mainly to give his employees a job. He renamed it Betsy after his late mother. And business has been so good, he's now building a second restaurant next door. What about you? Do you move back to a rebuilt home?
No. No, I'm. Why not? Um well, the home I was in was a rental, and so. That Is pretty simple math.
But this is my home, and it doesn't matter where I lay my head. here all day. For those who are trying to rebuild their homes, the process has been marred by insurance industry woes. Insurers aren't just fleeing, some of those that remain haven't paid up, leaving an estimated 70% of survivors facing delays or denials. The reality is that the insurance industry has been broken for a long time.
And it's really unfortunate that it came to this, and that the survivors are the ones. that are feeling really the The system broken in a way that's impacting their ability to move on. Many are still waiting or still fighting with insurance. Los Angeles County 5th District Supervisor Catherine Barger is the local official responsible for Altadena's recovery. Barger says many families are already feeling pushed out, and critical federal funding to help rebuild is on hold as the government reviews an estimated $40 billion in aid.
It's really unfortunate that the politics kind of took over on this. I need financial support for the survivors. Still, as a year has passed, and with recovery funds hanging in the balance, Jeff Tyler Wells has seen a flicker of hope. His restaurant was named one of the best new restaurants in the country by Eater. Reservations are booked up weeks in advance.
Many diners are fire victims. We try to meet people where they are and lead with empathy and say, hey, you don't know. this person might be in a halfway through a year-long fight with their insurance company. But what I've seen is there's a lot of optimism. There's a lot of people who have made peace with what happened, and people are finding these really beautiful ways to move forward and say.
you know yeah we we had this house for 30 years and it was our family home and it was our dream home But the garage door was crooked and it never closed or the door, you know, and so it's like they're they're finding an opportunity in correcting some things. Do you want me to walk you through?
Okay, I'm going to do a pivot door here. Karen Martinez is one of those people. They've built 37 homes out of this material. The insurance companies have begun offering discounts for building with the materials she got the county to approve. It's 47 pounds.
And she's trying to get her neighbors to use them too. An opportunity to improve on what was. and rebuild. better. You helped get this material recognized by the county.
You are now helping make rebuilding. Safer and also quicker through the permitting process. Yeah, exactly. That's gonna feel good. It does.
I mean, it it does, but there's a part of me that, um, wishes so many more people would would jump on board with You know, using non-combustible materials. And before it's too late. Right, exactly. Yeah, because we will get more fires, you know. It's just a matter of time.
We do these debriefs to try to give a sense of. Closure. Meaning to difficult cases so that they won't linger. But trust me The kids you'll lose will linger. The Pit was the surprise television hit of 2025, garnering multiple Emmys, including one for star Noel Wiley as Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series.
A veteran of T V's ER, Wiley is certainly no stranger to hospital dramas. And as our Dr. John Lapouche shares, he's at the center of everything. on the pit.
Yeah. Beginning in the 1960s, medical dramas became a staple of primetime TV. You may have followed the trials and tribulations of Doctors James Kildare, Marcus Welby. Hawkeye Pierce. Mark Craig Michaela Quinn.
And then in 1994, ER's Dr. John Carter. What the hell is going on? Played by Noah Wiley. Oh, oh my god, he's allergic to latex.
Okay. He's in a sister! When ER ended, if I had come to you and said, what are the odds that someday you're going to do another medical show? What would you have said? Damn, 0%.
What changed? COVID, you know, COVID changed everything, certainly for me in thinking about. There being another story to tell. I was getting a lot of mail from people on the front line saying. We could sure use Dr.
Carter out here or This is really awful. You have no idea what I've been through these last few months, but I've been here. For his work on ER, Wiley was nominated as best supporting actor five times. Noah Wiley. And finally took home an Emmy this past September when he received the trophy as Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for his portrayal of Dr.
Michael Rabinovich, Dr. Robbie on The Pit. The pit. The hit HBO Max series won five Emmys in all, including outstanding drama series. This is insane.
Yeah. Is this a drill? And season two is about to begin. Shut down all the computer systems. Are we next?
Okay, everybody, listen up. Dr. Robbie watches over the controlled chaos at the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center. Just send another up to the OR. I got room for one more red.
Got it. It all takes place over a single emergency room shift. and each episode covers just one hour in a very long day. My wife died a year ago. Yeah.
Because today's the day I'll be joining her. A few months ago, we visited the set at the Warner Brothers Studio in Burbank, California. I mean, I'm on a stage out there, and now I'm in an emergency room. Walk from backstage into the emergency room, and you feel you are in an actual hospital. It became really important to have the entire set feel like in a totally immersive experience.
Syringes. There's the tape. You open a drawer, everything that's supposed to be in the drawer is there. If somebody got into trouble here, you actually could fix them. Everything feels real and is exactly where it should go.
Two camera ones, Mark. Bberg. Rehearsing and background and action. Noah Wiley is in charge here in more ways than one. Not only is he a lead actor.
He is an executive producer and writer. And the days we dropped in, he also directed us. Effusion has grown.
Now, with RV collapse, actors at the pit have to learn more than their lines. Very slowly. There's a two-week medical boot camp. We try our best to educate them on CPR, how to suture, how to intubate the natural mechanics so that when they are on screen and the camera is quite tight and close, everything looks finessed and refined as if someone with experience has done it. Dr.
Elizabeth Ferreira, herself an emergency room doc, is one of the show's medical technical consultants. Sure, okay, go with the tonkin. In episode 10, we had a patient who actually got slugged in the eye by a baseball. She helps make sure the procedures look thoroughly real. How can you see with all that blood?
The realism does shock all of us when we enter a room and the prosthetic has been established on either the actor like this or in bed and we go, oh, that's not the actor. Hard at work. Yeah. That hyper-authenticity extends to the storylines in each episode. It's an unhappy patient.
A patient hit you. Since COVID, there's a kind of a... a stress level and anger that exists in the population, and that has translated to particularly to violence against nurses, but against all the healthcare providers. Executive producers John Wells and Scott Gemmel, both veterans of the classic ER TV series, said the pit began with considerable research. Do you address the issue of the loss of trust?
That the public has in public health. Disinformation, that was one of the biggest changes, I think. Besides COVID, you know, I don't remember the disinformation being at a level that it is these days. The biggest thing that we. talk about regularly is Dr.
Google, is this notion that everybody who comes in is already on their phone figuring out what it is they supposedly is wrong with them, and half of people have assumed that they've got the worst possible thing that could happen happening to them. And that's part of what the erosion of trust is. You're defending yourself against artificial intelligence is what's going to happen next. The Pitt's second season will continue to reflect real life and real problems. People are going to lose their health insurance.
People are going to delay care. People are going to continue to come in sicker. They're going to be more volatile when they come in. That's going to put more of a burden on staff. All this stuff is sort of moving towards this perfect storm of unsustainability.
Noah Wiley's connection to the medical community is more than what's in a script. His mother, Marjorie Speer, was an orthopedic and operating room nurse. Mom's at the hospital all day. I gotta walk home from school until mom gets home. Why couldn't you save her?
I mean, this is what you do. And then 35 years later, she's watching an episode of The Pit and comes over and says. That rocked me. I don't know how many people I've helped today, but I can tell you every other person who has died. She just starts listing all these names of patients that she had seen die when she was practicing.
I said, Mom, I've never heard these stories before. And she goes, oh, yeah. We were her kids. And She didn't show us that stuff. But the pit does show us that stuff.
And what happens when an empathetic doctor stops having empathy for himself? You know, in the old days it was kind of suck it up and it was a little bit of like I went through it, so you gotta go through it. You know, this is your training. We were up for four days straight. Yeah, and it became a badge of honor to survive it.
Oh jeez. We get feedback from people who, having seen the show, Realize that they too are suffering and have buried it the same way that the Robbie character did.
So that brings us to your meltdown. Everything's going crazy. We need the hero to come in on his white horse and save the day.
Okay, come on, give me your hand. He's on the floor. I can't. The heroes on the floor? How can that be?
So three decades after ER, Noah Wiley is once again playing a dedicated doctor. And as it turns out, It's a prescription he wrote. for himself. There were two points in my career during the pandemic and during this last work stoppage for the writers and actors strike. Those were the two moments when The flow of my career were interrupted and I Wasn't used to it.
It really rattled me. in a way that That rattled me. I remember saying to my wife, like I don't think I work for money. I think I work for health, my own health. Like, I think this is where I get my orientation.
And without it, I'm not sure I know what I do on this earth.
somewhere. Are you happy? I'm the happiest I've been in a long time. Does that surprise you? It just confirms, you know, it confirms all my worst suspicions about myself, which is that I really need all this.
Wow. As you've probably heard, New York City has a new mayor. who says he admires one predecessor perhaps more than any other. New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.
So who exactly was LaGuardia? What did he accomplish? We've asked Morocco. for a history lesson. Hear the name LaGuardia and you probably think of the airport and your associations may not be all that happy.
Mm-hmm. But the airport and much of modern New York's spectacular rise are the legacy of a 5'2 bundle of dynamite. Former three-term mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. Among his devotees, newly sworn in New York City Mayor Zaran Mamdani, who on election night promised the most ambitious agenda to tackle the cost of living crisis that this city has seen since the days of Fiorella Guardia. And what an agenda that was.
During the LaGuardia era, New York built bridges, tunnels and highways, schools and hospitals, playgrounds, pools and beaches. Under LaGuardia's watch, New York City becomes what? And New York City becomes the greatest city in the world. Kenneth T. Jackson is a professor emeritus of history at Columbia University.
Heavy. and the editor of the Two Million Word Encyclopedia of New York City. He took office in the middle of the Great Depression, January 1, 1934. It was a horrible time. That's when LaGuardia becomes mayor.
Talk about a bad hand to be playing. He's got his work cut out for him. He's got his work cut out for him. Fiorello LaGuardia was known as the Little Flower, the literal translation of his first name. but he was no shrinking violet.
Well, you know, one of the things we ought to say about Piero Linguori is his physical appearance. He's short. Short and stocky. Right. He's compared to a fireplug.
But he's loud. And he's brash. In other words, he overcomes it. Long before the advent of social media, LaGuardia knew that image meant influence. Bye.
And so he brandished a baton to conduct musical performances. He wore costumes, threw baseballs, held babies, and mugged with the biggest names of the day: Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, Albert Einstein, singer Marion Anderson, Even holding his own with Abbott and Costello. Wait a minute, that's the mayor. I'm a guardian, eh? No!
Oh, no! Oh, Mayor LaGuardia! Oh! If there was a fire, He'd be there. Mayor LaGuardia braves the smoke which knocks out scores of firefighters.
And he took a tough stance on vice and organized crime. Let this be noticed to the gangsters that they'll be treated just as rough as we're treating their implements here. To illustrate that, he took a sledgehammer to a bunch of slot machines. He knew how to get publicity, he knew how to do it, and he wanted to do it. He knew where the camera was, too.
That's right. That's good for somebody in that job. In fact, if you don't have that instinct, you're not going to have that job very long. Here's Victor. In one of his most storied moments, Mayor LaGuardia took to the airwaves in the midst of a newspaper strike to read the funny pages to children.
Crash! She crashes it on his head. Knock out. Throwing in some politics while he was at it. What does a dog mean?
It means that dirty money never brings any luck. Yeah. Fiorello LaGuardia was born in New York to Italian immigrants. His father was raised Catholic. His mother was Jewish.
Fiorello himself became a practicing Episcopalian. LaGuardia in some ways is the quintessential New Yorker. A one-man melting pod. but he actually grew up in the American West. His father was a band leader in the US Army.
By age twenty four he was back in New York, working as an interpreter at Ellis Island while he attended law school. That we route the hosts of evil and elect the quiet young mayor. As mayor, LaGuardia championed immigrants and the working class while reshaping the city through massive public works. but he could have never pulled off his ambitious agenda without two allies. His visionary and polarizing Parks Commissioner Robert Moses and Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose New Deal bankrolled much of what was built.
LaGuardia was a Republican, but the two shared the same progressive ideals. Under LaGuardia, we built our first public housing. That's an important thing because for the first 300 years of American history, Housing is your problem. Not my problem, the government. That's a huge...
Governmental shift.
So does LaGuardia help redefine what a city should do for its citizens? He's the most powerful public official. short of the Presidency. to say that What higher obligation do we have? than keeping our citizens alive.
What higher obligation do we have? than keeping them out of the cold. in January. What higher obligation do we have and to feed their children. when they're hungry.
I mean you just walk in and this And this, this is what you're greeted with. Michael Rosenberg is the President and CEO of New York City Center, one of the city's premier and most beautiful theaters. Without Fiorella LaGuardia, would we even be standing in this space? No, this would now be a parking lot. Originally built by the Shriners, the city took over the building when the Shriners couldn't pay their taxes.
LaGuardia proposed turning it into a temple for music, dance, and theater.
So he wanted this to be for whom? He wanted this to be for the average everyday working man of New York City. Tickets on opening night were just one dollar compared to ten dollars at the Metropolitan Opera. He also made the curtain times earlier so that it wasn't something where you would have to like get off work. go home, have dinner, come back here at 8 o'clock.
They would do curtain times at 5 o'clock. Because rich people were used to sort of going to the theater starting at 8 or 9 and staying out until midnight. But if you're a working man or woman. Yep, you have to be up very early. In fact, LaGuardia might have understood that better than most.
Gosh, I'm tired. But for Viarella LaGuardia, being mayor was a round-the-clock roll of a lifetime. LaGuardia is a great example of a mayor using the power and majesty of his office to support ideas that are important to him. And this is a great example. He believed in the arts and he saw this as a way of bringing that belief to life.
He was quite a person. And I think that That already didn't. He deserved New York, but New York deserved him. Uh they fit together. They needed each other.
And by the grace of God or whomever, it happened. As we ring in the new year, a respected physician is sharing some tips for a happy and healthy 2026 with Nora O'Donnell. Starting with a suggestion. You just might not expect.
Okay. Mm-hmm. I'll take a little dark chocolate and a little of that dark pistachio. Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel is serving up some unusual advice as you start out 2026.
Eat your ice cream, that doesn't sound like a New Year's resolution. Ice cream will make you happy, and that's very important. Why would I live longer eating ice cream? Ice cream is a good dairy product. It's got protein.
Its saturated fats are in a globule, so it doesn't affect you as much as saturated fats in meats and other things. Plus, you typically do it socially with someone else. You know, being happy is a very important part of living a long time. I feel like you're saying, eat your ice cream, is like, don't stress out as much about life, be more social. We're here for only 75, 85, 90 years.
You've got to make life enjoyable. You've got to make it fulfilling. The prominent oncologist and health policy expert is taking a different approach in his new wellness book called Eat Your Ice Cream. Six Simple Rules for a Long and Healthy Life. I want people to stop obsessing.
Make it part of your life. You should like exercising. You should like eating well. Otherwise, you're not going to do it for years and years and decades, which is what's necessary for a long, healthy life. The Doctor's Health Handbook does include the basics of what to eat, how to exercise, and the all-important reminder that sleep is fundamental to wellness.
But it goes beyond that. This book is broken into six behaviors, starting with Don't be a schmuck. Not something I would think of the first chapter for a wellness or longevity book. One of the things that is, I think, core to the book is stop doing things. uh that aren't good for your health.
And so don't be a schmuck as. Or don't be an idiot. Don't make mistakes. Right, but don't be a schmuck is my father's reference to us when we were being stupid. And so there are lots of things that.
We do as human beings that can be schmucky.
So, list some of those things.
Well, smoking. Vaping. doing drugs, not taking your vaccines. I don't agree with the current administration and they're dead wrong on this. also on the so called SHMUCK list.
Alcohol. This is what everybody wants to know about, the right amount of alcohol or no alcohol. There has been a lot of research on alcohol, so here's the way I distill it. Um The safest level is Probably zero. There are some studies, and we should be clear.
Where it's half a cup a day, three cups a week. Nobody drinks a half a glass of wine.
So you drink every other day. On the other hand, 60, 65% of the public. Drinks, you're not going from 65% to zero, so you have to give people reasonable advice. And the reasonable advice is, first of all, no binge drinking, that's really bad for you. Don't drink alone.
That's really bad for you. If you're using alcohol as a lubricant for social interaction, which many people do. That's probably good. You're getting some benefit from the social interaction.
Social interactions, a consistent theme for Dr. Emmanuel, is something he learned at a young age. One of the fascinating things about you Is you're a cancer doctor and a professor. Your brother, Ari. is a super agent.
in Hollywood. Your other brother, Rom. Former mayor of Chicago, ambassador, maybe running for president of the United States. What is it that your parents taught all of you that has led you? I mean, you're all incredibly successful.
Um Now you're going to make me cry, because every time I talk about my parents that are growing up, I tend to cry. They taught us how to be social and interact with people. They also taught us how to be responsible. One of the things my mom did in raising us is: you know, get out of the house and go occupy yourself. Ram and I went to school.
I was six in first grade, and he was in nursery school. I had to take him from school, walk two blocks across a busy street, get on a bus, pay the car fare, get off at the right spot. I learned a huge amount of responsibility. Taking care for your young brother. Taking care of my brothers.
The other thing I think they did, which was super important for us, is we all slept in the same bedroom. We were a unit. We, yes, we fought endlessly. And I like to joke with people. We didn't go to bed until there was blood, you know, because of all the fights.
But we were also each other's best friends. His takeaway, relationships matter. Dr. Emmanuel lists lifestyle choices he considers anti-wellness, like chronic stress, a fast food diet, social media, and dining alone.
So I think people would agree with all of those, with the exception of dining alone. Like a lot of people. go to a restaurant or get home from work and dine alone. If it's an occasional thing. Don't make it every day.
And if you find yourself dining alone, what you should do is call up a friend. If you're sitting at a bar, Right, and you're dining there, ask the person next to you: you know, have you been to this restaurant before? You know, what do you do? Why are you here? Yeah, strike up a conversation.
We underplay. Those casual conversations and how important they are for us. One of the interesting things you talk about in this book and may surprise people is what you say about retirement. Ah. Yeah.
Retirement leads to more rapid cognitive decline for people. I say to people, don't retire. And if you're going to retire, you have to plan retirement well so that you stay engaged, you stay mentally sharp. And that doesn't mean, well, you know, I'm going to try to play the saxophone one day. But Dr.
Mino, a lot of retired people like to buy books and watch Sunday morning.
Well, if they're buying books and staying mentally engaged that way, if they're going to volunteer, or they're talking to friends, or they're taking up a new hobby seriously, all of that is excellent, highly endorsed. Meaning don't retire the mind or retire your social engagement. Yes, and it's very important. You've got to be deliberate about it. You can't let...
Nature, take us first.
So what's the biggest piece of advice you have for someone in 2026? Build your social relationships. It's definitely the most important thing for long-lasting. uh health and happiness. It's time they know the truth about us.
We're warriors. The world's gonna start over and this time we're on top. With credits like Black Panther, Sinners, and The Creed trilogy, Michael B. Jordan has starred in some of the biggest hits of the past decade. His famous name rings out in Hollywood and all around the globe.
with Tracy Smith. Here's our Sunday profile. Greed spins, puts the champ in the corner. It's not much of a stretch to say that Michael B. Jordan has fought his way to the top.
His performances are often game-changing as a boxing champ. Flemont. Or a Marvel villain. No! But his latest film required a different kind of superpower.
Sky be tonight. In Ryan Koogler's Sinners, Jordan plays twin brothers, Stack and Smoke, who open a backwoods honky-tonk in the segregated South. Yeah. Goodness. I got 500 more bottles just like that.
Ice cold. Say we pay you $40 tonight and all the beer that you can drink. After that, no strings. You act now? I even let you finish that bottle in your hand.
So when Ryan Koogler shared this idea with you of playing two different parts. two different people. What was your initial reaction? I'm gonna do what? I think it was a little bit of anxiety.
I think a little a little bit of nerves, but then equal amount of excitement. And it gets really exciting when vampires show up. Yeah, Sinners is a horror film, but it's also about history and the power of family ties. That ain't your brother.
Okay. Love you. Love you too. Be careful. I will.
To play characters from the Jim Crow South, Jordan drew a bit from his own family history. Relatives on his mother's side hail from Hope, Arkansas, but years ago moved to a segregated black neighborhood in Los Angeles called Oakwood, a place that's now Venice Beach. The First Baptist Church of Venice was the center of their community and one of the only remnants still standing. Churches were like safe havens, you know. Places of prayer and refuge.
Jordan, who moved to New Jersey as a toddler, never went to this church, but he says he can still feel the connection to his family's past. I just wonder if these walls could talk. Ooh, the history. I mean, you can feel the weight when you walk into a place like this. Did you grow up in church?
I did, I did, I did. I grew up in church, you know, very spiritual family. Did shooting centers make you think about your own family history more? Big time, big time. It definitely connected me back to my family's history.
That I've always always had a strong connection with, but it just kind of re reframed it a bit. His own history is remarkable as well. Dad is a US Marine veteran, mom's a former high school counselor, and Michael Bakari Jordan, that's him on the left, was a child model, then a child star.
So you gonna put me back on the money? He was still in high school when he was cast in the landmark series, The Wire. How you doing, son? And a few years later, another landmark show: Friday Night Lights. You like to hit?
Hit what, people? Yeah, I like that. You know, there's nobody in my family that came from this, I guess, that looked at it as a potential career. You know, I could think. Once I didn't go to college and I decided to move to California and pursue acting full-time, there was like no there was no turning back after that one.
His film breakout came in 2013 in director Ryan Koogler's drama Fruit Vale Station. You're safe inside with your cousins. What about you, Daddy? Me? Maybe I'm gonna be fine.
Jason. Jordan worked with Kugler again a few years later when he climbed into the ring for 2015's Creed, a spin-off of the Rocky franchise. And by the way, the first Rocky film where Sylvester Stallone didn't have top billing. Bills, bills, bills, go! The history of me.
That bell don't mean schools out, Donnie. Keep calm. Doing Creed so many different levels. The first time I transported my body, you know, learned a skill. That I continue to do today, you know.
You still box? Yeah, it's a part of me at this point. Speak. And this character stuck with him too, but not in a good way. You ain't the son of a king, you are the son of a murderer.
Yay! Eric Killmonger, the bad guy in Black Panther, who tried to dethrone the hero, played by the late Chadwick Boseman. This is for my father. No, hey! No.
I'm your king. Was it hard to Shake Eric? Yes. You know, it kind of stuck with me for a bit and, you know, went to therapy, talked about it, found a way to kind of just decompress. I think at that point, Still learning that I needed to decompress from my character.
So you literally went to therapy to help. rid yourself a little bit of Eric or at least Yeah, and then I think that spiraled into a bigger conversation and self-discovery of like, okay, you know, I think that's something that's necessary for people. You know, especially men. I think it's good for them to go and talk. That's something that not ashamed of at all and very and very proud of and definitely helped me in Trying to be a g good communicator in the Well-rounded person inside and out.
For Jordan, now 38, part of being well-rounded is a strong relationship with mom and dad. You continued to live with your parents up until well after you could afford to move out on your own and have your own house. This is true. Why? That makes I love my parents.
You know, I love them. You know, and and uh Made for a lot of funny moments, a lot of great stories. Like Y'all ain't got enough time. We ain't got enough time. I'm a night owl, you know, like just things.
They go to sleep early. Insert moment here. Hey, how are you? We should mention he bought them a house of their own in the LA suburbs. He just lived there for a while.
Who doesn't want to buy your parents a house, you know, and your mom a house? That's always been the childhood dream. Retire your parents and not them not having to work anymore. And I could say I did that.
So that's like a. Yeah, that's a bucket list. Talk about Bucket List. Sinners is squarely in the Oscar conversation, both for the film and for Jordan's performance. It's a welcome distinction for someone who lived his early life under the shadow of another famous Michael.
I should ask you this. What's up?
So, you grew up playing sports, right? I did, I did. Was the name Michael Jordan a problem? Big time. I got teased so much.
To the point where I almost changed my name. You did think about changing your name? I did. It was going to be Buccari Jordan. Your middle name.
Yeah, my middle name. And what would they say? Will you think you're Michael Jordan? That guy? Verbatim.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly that. Not too creative. It definitely made me want to be competitive and be good at, I wanted to be great at something.
If not for nothing else at that time, just to like. feel like I had my own identity. You know, in a in a in a world that was so, you know, that M. J. was Mike, you know.
But there could be another Michael Jordan who could make his mark. Correct. That was a part of the The alchemy that made me. Who I am today. Put it this way, Michael Bakari Jordan could be well on his way to his own brand of immortality.
Bakari means noble promise. Do you feel like you've fulfilled that? I feel like I'm walking in that and will continue to do so. Big time. We have a lot more things to do.
You know, we're just getting started. Yeah. I'm Lee Cowan. Thanks for listening, and please join us when our trumpet sounds again.
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