This biographical drama film, directed by indie filmmaker Destin Daniel Cretton, will mark Michael B. Jordan’s next appearance on the big screen after a banner that saw him star in two of the year’s biggest films: “Black Panther” and “Creed II.”Based on the memoir by lawyer and social justice activist Bryan Stevenson,
the film follows the real-life case of Walter McMillian, a black man imprisoned for the murder of a white woman in 1986, despite having evidence to prove otherwise. Thanks to the legal work of defense attorney Stevenson and his team, McMillian was exonerated by the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals in the 1993 case Walter McMillian v. State.Jordan is, of course, playing Stevenson, and he’s surrounded by talent, including Oscar winners Jamie Foxx and Brie Larson (reuniting with her “Short Term 12” director), as well as O’Shea Jackson Jr., Rob Morgan, Rafe Spall, and Tim Blake Nelson.
Foxx costars as Walter McMillian, an African American pulpwood worker sent to Alabama’s death row in 1988 for the murder of a white woman, who maintains his innocence as his clock ticks down and his tenuous hopes for exoneration fade.Directing a script he wrote with Andrew Lanham, Cretton tracks Stevenson’s fight to overturn McMillian’s death sentence and those of other inmates sentenced to die in Alabama, the only U.S. state that does not provide postconviction legal aid to the condemned.As an actor, “I grew up a lot on this movie,” said Jordan, whose credits date to the first season of HBO’s “The Wire” in 2002 and also include the Coogler-directed “Black Panther,” “Fruitvale Station” and “Creed.” “I took chances and risks that I normally didn’t have the opportunity to, or maybe wouldn’t have done at an earlier age. It challenged me to find another layer, another depth that I haven’t tapped into.”
Early reactions to the film’s deeply felt performances, including turns by Rob Morgan and O’Shea Jackson Jr. as McMillian’s fellow incarcerees Herbert Richardson and Anthony Ray Hinton, have been “energizing,” Stevenson said. “There’s so much apprehension when you try and get people closer to something that they don’t usually choose to get close to. You worry that they’ll cover their ears and shut their eyes and just kind of reject it.
“To see people slowly open their hearts and take it in, even though it’s challenging at times, is incredibly gratifying and exciting, because if we can get people around the world to open their hearts to the pain of injustice and the trauma that inequality can create, we can motivate people to do more,” he said.
After filming “Just Mercy” last summer in and around Atlanta, Cretton was still in postproduction when he had his first meetings with Marvel this year for “Shang-Chi,” which he’s now prepping as “Just Mercy” is poised to hit theaters.
