Most dancers hunt for shoes that fit just right. Jaafar Jackson went the other way on purpose.
Jaafar is Michael Jackson’s nephew, the son of Michael’s brother Jermaine, and he plays the King of Pop in the new movie “Michael.” Before he ever hit his marks, he made one strange choice. He squeezed his feet into loafers that were too small.
Not a little too small either. We’re talking a half size, sometimes a full size down from what he actually wears.
Why would anyone do that to themselves? Jaafar explained it on Complex’s “Sneaker Shopping,” a show where guests walk through their shoe collection and the stories behind it. A tighter loafer, he said, let him feel the floor and control his footwork the way his uncle did. The cost was real. His feet kept going numb right under him.
Here’s Jaafar laying out the loafer trick, the numb feet and the move that gave him the most trouble, all in his own words.
Jaafar Jackson talks through dancing in Michael’s too-small loafers
In the interview he puts numbers on it. “Sometimes it would go numb for 20 minutes, sometimes it would go numb for 2 hours,” he says. On the fit he’s blunt: “To dance in loafers, especially, you know, I had to dance in a half size down or full size down.” The circulation got so bad that, in his words, “my toe would go completely white, it get completely cold.”
So which Michael move cost him the most?
It was the toe stand. That’s the one where the dancer rises straight up off the floor and balances on the very tips of his toes, the whole body stacked tall over two points no bigger than a coin. Michael made it look weightless. Jaafar learned fast that it’s anything but.
He told Variety that going up on his toes, over and over in rehearsal, was the hardest thing he had to pull off. “Doing it over and over hurts you,” he said, and it left him with “a whole new respect for ballet dancers. Their toes are probably the strongest part of the body.”
Doing that in shoes a size too small, take after take, until his feet went cold and white. That was the price of looking like his uncle on screen.
If you want to see the move the way Michael did it, “Smooth Criminal” is the one to watch. Keep an eye on the footwork and the rise onto the toes, and you’ll get why Jaafar’s feet took such a beating trying to match it.
Michael Jackson performing the footwork and toe rise in “Smooth Criminal”
The real shoes are having a moment too. Michael’s own black Florsheim loafers from his Motown 25 rehearsals go on show in Ireland this Friday ahead of a December auction. Jaafar could’ve leaned on camera tricks for a lot of this. He went with the sore feet, and he says it gave him a deeper respect for everything his uncle pulled off in a pair of plain dress shoes.