Jonathan Majors flexes his acting muscle, turns heavyweight

By JAKE COYLE
AP Film Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — After breaking through in 2019’s “The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” 33-year-old Jonathan Majors has been steadily bulking up as an actor. But 2023 is the year Majors turns heavyweight. He is the new movies-spanning villain of Marvel-dom, the time-traveling supervillain Kang the Conqueror. He is Michael B. Jordan’s friend-turned-foe in “Creed III,” which opens Friday in theaters. And in Elijah Bynum’s prize-winning Sundance entry “Magazine Dreams,” Majors is an amateur bodybuilder warped by childhood trauma. It’s a performance that could earn him an Oscar nomination next year. Majors’ ascendance, to anyone who has been watching, is not even a little surprising. A classical and soulful kind of movie star, Majors is in a weight class by himself.