Ben Affleck Explains His Decision Not To Show Michael Jordan’s Face In New Nike Movie “Air”

Ben Affleck‘s newest movie Air chronicles how the footwear company Nike first signed Michael Jordan. However, the director decided not to show Jordan on screen.

“Jordan is too big,” Affleck, 50, told The Hollywood Reporter about not showing Jordan’s face in a recent interview. “He exists above and around the story, but if you ever concretize him, if you ever say, ‘Yes, that’s Michael Jordan,’ we know it’s not, really. It’s fake,” said the actor-director who plays Nike cofounder Philip Knight.

“I thought if the audience brought everything they thought and remembered about him and what he meant to them to the movie and projected it onto the movie, it worked better,” the 60-year-old added.

Affleck then revealed that he reached out to Jordan before the film and asked for advice on who will play his mom, Deloris Jordan. That’s when Jordan insisted that Viola Davis was his mom.

“That’s my mom.’ He was dead serious,” Affleck said. “‘Viola Davis, that’s my mom.’ And that was it. Discussion was over. However, it happened, it wasn’t his problem, but it was going to f—ing happen. And I was like, ‘Okay, Mike.'”

Davis was “flattered” to learn that Jordan wanted her to play her mom in the film.

Air premieres in theaters on Wednesday.