To play Michael Jackson in a movie, you’d think a person would need years of acting behind them. Jaafar Jackson had none. And here’s the surprise. He never even wanted any.
Jaafar is Michael’s nephew, and he landed the lead in the new film “Michael.” But the road to that role was nothing like you might expect.
Producer Graham King remembers it well. “We looked at nearly 200 actors around the globe, and no one could beat Jaafar,” he says. So King sat down with the young man over lunch and asked a simple question. “Have you ever acted before?”
Jaafar’s answer? “Never. I never wanted to be an actor.”
That would end most auditions right there. But King couldn’t shake what he had seen. He says Jaafar was “channeling Michael” so completely that he kept asking whether the young man was secretly auditioning after all. King even decided the whole “I don’t want this” act had to be a trick. Reverse psychology, he called it.
It wasn’t a trick. Jaafar really had spent his childhood dreaming about something else entirely, a world away from recording studios and movie sets.
He finally said it out loud on “The Tonight Show” with Jimmy Fallon back in April. The clip is below, and it’s worth watching for the look on his face when he admits it. He even gets emotional talking about what it meant to become Michael for the camera.
Jaafar on “The Tonight Show,” on the role and his real dream
So what did young Jaafar dream of becoming? It wasn’t anything you do on a stage. The career he wanted is a sport, a quiet and patient game that takes years to master, and it’s about as far from a concert as you can get. Almost nobody guesses it on the first try.
Once you hear it, it makes a sweet kind of sense. A calm, focused boy born into the most musical family on earth, dreaming of something all his own. Music, he says, only caught his interest later on.
Watch the full interview above to hear Jaafar name the dream job himself, and to see the moment the memory of playing his uncle brings tears to his eyes.