Johnny Storm, also known as The Human Torch and one-fourth of Marvel's Fantastic Four, was originally written as a blonde-haired, blue-eyed daredevil. So when Michael B. Jordan was announced as the new face of Storm in Marvel's reboot, he says he expected some pushback.
"You're not supposed to go on the Internet when you're cast as a superhero," Jordan wrote in an open letter for Entertainment Weekly. "(But) I didn't want to be ignorant about what people were saying."
Jordan's online hunt turned up comments that boiled down to: "A black guy? I don't like it," he says.
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"I can see everybody's perspective, and I know I can't ask the audience to forget 50 years of comic books," Jordan adds. "But the world is a little more diverse in 2015 than when the Fantastic Four comic first came out in 1961."
Read the actor's full letter, ahead of his new movie's August premiere, over at Entertainment Weekly.
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