Name: Michael
Released: 2026

When Colman Domingo settled behind the Jimmy Kimmel Live desk on the evening of July 20, he was playing at least two roles simultaneously. As guest host — filling in for a vacationing Jimmy Kimmel — he was the most accomplished actor in the room: an Emmy winner, a two-time Oscar nominee, the man the trades have started calling a prestige-television institution. As the actor who played Joe Jackson in Michael — the Antoine Fuqua–directed biopic that his co-star and guest Jaafar Jackson had carried for two and a half hours — he was also the screen authority figure the film had spent its runtime dramatizing. The pairing, on a Tuesday night in July, had a neatness to it that real life rarely bothers to arrange.

Sitting across from Domingo was Jaafar Jackson, 29, making a press-tour appearance for a film that his cousin Paris Jackson has publicly disowned. The conversation was gracious. Jacob Elordi, the third guest, praised both men for their performances. The audience responded warmly. And somewhere in that warmth was the particular contradiction that Jaafar Jackson has been navigating since Michael opened in April: he won the argument he was placed inside, while the argument itself — about what the film actually did and did not tell — is still running.

Jaafar Jackson was the element no one planned for inside a project built entirely on planning. The film became the first biographical picture in cinema history to cross $1 billion at the global box office, a milestone confirmed by The Grio on July 13. It also carries a 38% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a gap between commercial performance and critical reception that is almost without precedent in modern Hollywood. The explanation for that gap is, in part, Jaafar Jackson’s performance. Critics who dismissed the film as hollow in three paragraphs used a fourth to say that its lead was extraordinary. It is not a small thing to be the fourth paragraph in a pan.

The film’s path to its present state requires some context. Michael began as an authorized epic: the Jackson estate, Katherine Jackson, and Lionsgate were all aligned on a production that would celebrate Michael Jackson‘s life and music. Antoine Fuqua was hired to give the project visual authority. The initial intention, according to reporting by both the Washington Post and Forbes, was to include at least some engagement with the abuse allegations that defined the final chapter of Michael Jackson’s public life — the accusations made by the Chandler family in 1993, the criminal trial, the broader pattern of accusations that persisted until his death in 2009 and, in the form of the 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland, well beyond it.

What actually reached screens was different. Reshoots reported to have cost as much as $50 million were required after a legal complication emerged: a settlement clause in an existing agreement legally prevented the production from depicting one of Jackson’s accusers by name or likeness. The filmmakers, unable to work around the clause, removed the entire third act and rebuilt the film around Michael Jackson’s preparation for the 1987 Bad tour. The result is a film that ends before the accusations begin — technically accurate, narratively convenient, and critically described, with near-unanimity across publications from the Daily Beast to the Washington Post, as sanitized.

The strongest version of the criticism came from within the Jackson family itself. Paris Jackson — Michael’s daughter, which makes her Jaafar’s first cousin — publicly distanced herself from the production before release and has not appeared at any of its promotional events. She described the film as appearing to “pander to a very specific section of my dad’s fandom that still lives in a fantasy.” That phrase — a fantasy — is the word that sticks. It implies not just an omission but an active construction: a portrait built to serve an audience whose relationship with Michael Jackson depends on a version of events the full record does not support.

On that reading, Jaafar Jackson’s acclaimed performance functions as something uncomfortable: the genuinely excellent element of a protection project. If critics found the film impossible to dismiss entirely, it was partly because they found the lead impossible to dismiss. His presence gave the sanitized film a kind of inoculation. The more persuasively he channeled his uncle, the harder it became to say simply that the whole enterprise was dishonest.

That argument has force. It also asks Jaafar Jackson to be responsible for decisions he did not make. He was cast after a two-year international search — one of the most scrutinized casting processes in recent Hollywood memory. He spent more than a year in preparation, working with choreographers who had worked with Michael Jackson on the original productions. Katherine Jackson, who retained approval over the casting, told interviewers that he “embodies” her son. Colman Domingo described watching Jaafar in rehearsal as leaving him “stunned by how completely he seemed to channel his late uncle’s essence.” Domingo has been selective about his roles since his Oscar nominations. That selectivity is not meaningless.

The awards circuit agreed. Jaafar Jackson won Best Actor at the 2026 Astra Midseason Movie Awards and Outstanding Performance at the National Film Awards UK. He also signed with CAA, as confirmed by The Hollywood Reporter. The trade framed it as the obvious next move after a breakout. The move is also, practically, a step toward a career that is not built around a single biological fact. He has cited Daniel Day-Lewis, Joaquin Phoenix, and Christian Bale as acting influences. None of those actors made careers by performing their relatives. All of them built careers by becoming strangers.

That is the test Jaafar Jackson has not yet taken. The Kimmel appearance — charming, easy, warmly received — was a press-tour beat, not a career-defining moment. What it revealed was that he is not rattled by the complexity of his position. He appeared as a guest on a show where his on-screen father figure was the host. He did not appear defensive about the film his cousin has criticized. He was present in the room in a way that a performer still processing the institutional weight of what he had done might not have been.

Whether the audience of $1 billion — which is real, and which chose in extraordinary numbers to spend money and time on this specific film — gets to define what his uncle’s legacy means is a separate question from whether Jaafar Jackson gets to define what his own career means. Those two questions are about to separate in ways that will be more interesting to watch than any press-tour reunion.

What the record shows — and what is still being argued

Michael is the highest-grossing biographical film in cinema history, confirmed by Variety and The Grio. Jaafar Jackson’s performance was praised consistently across critical consensus while the film received 38% on Rotten Tomatoes. Paris Jackson publicly called the film a fantasy. Katherine Jackson approved Jaafar’s casting and described him as embodying her son. Colman Domingo called the lead performance a revelation. The Hollywood Reporter confirmed Jaafar Jackson signed with CAA after release. He is 29 years old.

What remains contested: whether a film legally prevented from depicting abuse allegations can be considered an honest account of its subject. Whether Jaafar Jackson’s acclaimed performance inside that film serves the myth the estate controls or transcends it. And whether the audience that crossed the $1 billion threshold has any obligation to the parts of Michael Jackson’s story the film chose not to tell.

Jaafar Jackson played a man he knew through family memory and pop-culture mythology, under conditions that would have exposed a less prepared actor in the first reel. He did not fail that test. What he does with the next one is what will tell us who he actually is.

Tags: Michael Jackson, Colman Domingo, biopics, Jaafar Jackson, Paris Jackson