As a writer/director, Jordan has a highly idiosyncratic body of work, ranging from mainstream hits like Interview with the Vampire to commercial failures like We're No Angels to a variety of more personal, low-budget arthouse pictures filmed in his native Ireland and the UK.

Jordan was born in County Sligo. He was educated at St. Paul's College, Raheny , he was raised catholic, I was brought up a Catholic and was quite religious at one stage in my life, when I was young. But it left me with no scars whatever; it just sort of vanished , and then in University College Dublin, where he studied Irish history and English literature. When John Boorman was filming Excalibur in Ireland, he recruited Jordan as a script consultant, which led to his doing second unit work. His first feature Angel, a tale of a musician caught up in the Troubles, starred Stephen Rea who has subsequently appeared in almost all of Jordan's films to date.

Unconventional sexual relationships are a recurring theme in Jordan's work, and he often finds a sympathetic side to characters audiences would traditionally consider deviant or downright horrifying. His film The Miracle, for instance, followed two characters who struggled to resist a strong, incestuous attraction, while The Crying Game made complicated, likable characters out of an IRA terrorist and a transgendered woman. Vampire, like the Anne Rice book it was based on, focused on the intense homosexual relationship of two undead men who murder humans nightly (although the pair never have sex, they are clearly lovers of a sort), accompanied by an equally lusty vampire woman who is eternally trapped in the body of a little girl. While Lestat (Tom Cruise) is depicted in an attractive but villainous manner, his lover Louis (Brad Pitt) and the child vampire Claudia (Kirsten Dunst) are meant to capture the audience's sympathy despite their predatory nature.

In addition to the unusual sexuality of Jordan's films, he frequently returns to the Troubles of Northern Ireland. The Crying Game and Breakfast on Pluto both concern a transgendered character, both concern the Troubles, and both feature frequent Jordan leading man Stephen Rea. The two films, however, are very different, with Crying Game a realistic thriller/romance and Breakfast on Pluto a much more episodic, stylized, darkly comic biography. Jordan also frequently tells stories about children or young people, such The Miracle and The Butcher Boy. While his pictures are most often grounded in reality, he occasionally directs more fantastic or dreamlike films, such as The Company of Wolves, High Spirits, Interview with the Vampire and In Dreams.

The critical success of Jordan's early pictures led him to Hollywood, where he directed High Spirits and We're No Angels, both were critical and financial failures. He later returned home to make the more personal The Crying Game. Its unexpected success led him back to American studio film making, where he directed Interview with the Vampire. He has not had a major hit since Vampire, although several of his recent films have done well by arthouse standards and have been generally popular with critics.

Despite the unconventional and often non-heterosexual relationships depicted in his films, Jordan himself has been twice married to women and has several children.

He was related to one of the victims of the Dublin and Monaghan Bombings in 1974.

He resides primarily in Dublin, Ireland.