Susan Lucci is looking back fondly on her decades-long run on All My Children, and one former co-star still stands out to her years later: Michael B. Jordan.
During a recent appearance on the I Choose Me With Jennie Garth podcast, the daytime television icon was asked which actors she most vividly remembers working with throughout her time on the ABC soap.
Lucci didn’t hesitate before naming Jordan, who joined the series in the early 2000s while still a teenager.
Jordan portrayed Reggie Montgomery from 2003 to 2006, a role that placed him directly in Lucci’s orbit. Reggie was the adopted son of Jack Montgomery, Erica Kane’s longtime on-again, off-again love interest, which meant Lucci and Jordan shared frequent scenes. At the time, Jordan was just 16 years old.
“He was always so wonderful to work with,” Lucci said. She described him as consistently prepared and professional, noting that he showed up on time, knew his material, and treated everyone on set with respect.
According to Lucci, that maturity never felt forced. “Not phony baloney,” she explained, adding that Jordan was simply “authentically who he was.”
Lucci summed up her memories of the actor as “a genuinely terrific young man,” a sentiment that has only grown as Jordan’s career has continued to grow.
Before Jordan stepped into the role, Reggie Montgomery was originally portrayed by Chadwick Boseman. Boseman’s brief time on the series is often remembered as an early chapter in his career, and the connection later came full circle when he and Jordan starred together in Black Panther in 2018.
Jordan’s All My Children storyline was one of the show’s more complex arcs, following Reggie from a troubled past marked by violence and instability to eventual adoption by Jack Montgomery and a path toward college and basketball. The role allowed Jordan to explore emotional range at a young age, something Lucci clearly noticed at the time.
Jordan himself has acknowledged how valuable his soap opera years were. In the past, he said he was surprised by how often industry executives remembered him from daytime television, calling that exposure an unexpected but lasting advantage.