Jason Bateman's character, marketing specialist Rob Strasser, states in the film, 'a shoe is always just a shoe until someone steps into it.' The line reveals the gamble that Affleck took in not actually showing the man who so directly inspired the design of the Air Jordan. Keeping him hidden and almost entirely muted during these meetings leads us to believe that he had little agency of his own, despite that not being the case. We hear Young utter a couple of words of dialogue and see the back of the actor's head during crucial meetings with Jordan's mother (Viola Davis) and father (Julius Tennon). Though we never see his face, you might be wondering who is the actor who portrays Michael Jordan in the Air movie? Damian Young is the actor who portrays Jordan in the film. In researching the Air true story, we learned that director Ben Affleck, who also stars in the movie as Nike co-founder and CEO Phil Knight, said that the main reason he chose not to depict Michael Jordan in the movie was out of deference to him and because he's so famous and familiar to people that no one would be able to portray him without the audience saying, 'This is a knockoff Michael Jordan.' You might be curious why a movie about Michael Jordan's monumental 1984 shoe deal with Nike doesn't actually show the basketball superstar, at least not his face.
Why isn't Michael Jordan depicted in the Air movie?
