I watched how he dealt with the ankle monitor, all of that. My stepfather, who raised me, was incarcerated for 15 years before we met. In the cinema, millions of people a day can meet someone, you know? I have a huge investment in what it means to be a young Black man, and what this idea of incarceration means. In life, we only meet one person at a time. I try to figure out what I can share with other folks. With every character, I try to see who they really are, who they represent in society. So even when my arms felt like they were on fire, I just kept punching. Every time Anderson’s up there on screen, in those fights, I could see my own granddaddy’s name up there, too. I kept finding ways to, you know, stay on the hook. So that gives you some sense of how far in I wanted to put myself with this character. It’s the name of the paternal side of my family. Majors: This guy, Damian Anderson … first of all, the name Anderson is the (character) name Michael and I agreed on (at Majors’ suggestion).
Phillips: Jonathan, with a different actor and maybe a different director, it’s easy to imagine Damian as a one-dimensional villain.
Is it stretching and bending the rules? Yes. I’d never seen someone (on screen) try to strategically “dead” someone’s arm, but I’d seen it happen in real fights, and it fit Damian’s character so well because that would be his style of boxing. We’ve done the swollen eye, we’ve done the broken nose, the broken ribs, but we’d never shown someone’s tooth getting knocked out. We had to show injuries we hadn’t shown before. That’s when Dame and Felix Chavez (José Benavidez Jr.) have their title match.
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