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NEW YORK – Anthony Mackie really wanted to make a good first impression on Harrison Ford.
So when his co-star accepted his dinner invitation during their first week filming “Captain America: Brave New World” in Atlanta, Mackie asked Ford what he liked to eat.
“I would really like some really clean Italian food,” he says Ford told him.
Mackie was perplexed: What the hell is clean Italian food?
Over the next week Mackie – a first-time MCU headliner, trying to impress a blockbuster legend – asked friends, acquaintances, anyone if they knew what “clean Italian food” meant. Was it fish? A salad? No red sauce? No one knew.
“I called at least 100 people,” Mackie says.
Mackie even contacted a friend living on the Italian island of Ischia; his buddy, confused by the question, thought he was asking whether Italian people take showers. Every time Mackie looked over at Ford on set, the same two words popped in his head – clean Italian. What did that mean?
Mackie – Captain America himself! – was losing it. He had invited Harrison Ford to dinner and still hadn’t shared the details. Finally, he asked Ford what he meant.
“I said, ‘I’ve been thinking, what is clean Italian?’” Mackie says before slipping back into a raspy Ford impression. “He goes, ‘It’s Italian food made by an Italian.’”
“What do you do with that?” Mackie asks, belly-laughing as he relates the Seinfeldian exchange. Mackie found an Italian place in Atlanta run by “an Italian dude from Italy, making Italian food,” with waiters who were speaking Italian. His week-long crisis was resolved. The dinner was a success.
And the food?
“It was clean,” Mackie says. “It was sooo clean.”
“But it was sooo nerve-racking, dude.”
Should Anthony Mackie be nervous?
That’s what everyone wants to know: How the shield feels. How the title feels. How the attention feels.
You won’t find the 46-year-old actor trying to face all this with super-heroic stoicism but with something that looks suspiciously like humanity. He’s persistent, sure, but also amusing, honest, a little awkward – and quick to pull out a ridiculous story.
He thanks me for not asking what it was like to work with Ford, knowing he’ll hear that question repeatedly during the next month’s marathon of junket interviews and red-carpet stops. He envisions responding, with a straight expression, that Ford punched him in the face every day on set: “He came with his ‘Indiana Jones’ lasso and just started whippin’!”
It is a frigid mid-January morning in Tribeca, and Mackie is sipping on a black coffee with Baileys in a corner of the posh lobby of the Greenwich Hotel. We’re weeks from the Feb. 14 release of “Captain America: Brave New World,” the movie in which he’ll finally star not as the first Avenger’s sidekick but as Cap himself.
It’s been a wild month. He played golf with Keegan Bradley at the Sony Open; he celebrated the Golden Globes victory of his friend Sebastian Stan by proclaiming, “We won!” in a viral moment. He did manage to clear his schedule and watch “Superman II” on TV. (“That was the movie that made me say, ‘I want to be a superhero.’”)
He’s still processing the deadly New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans, where he still lives, and the fallout from the wildfires in Los Angeles, where our interview was supposed to take place. As he was flying out of Los Angeles, a flight attendant jokingly asked why he wasn’t out there fighting the fires. Mackie wasn’t laughing. “All of this puts in perspective to me that what I do is make-believe, and what they do is real,” he says, referring to first responders. “Let’s be respectful.”
Mackie has been uncomfortable among strangers most of his life, which makes the attention exhilarating but stressful. Yes, Captain America struggles with social anxiety. He pushes through it by flashing that unmistakable gap-toothed grin, understanding that being Cap, a pantheonic figure in American culture, is the definition of uncomfortable. And Mackie – the grandson of a sharecropper, the son of a roofer and a stay-at-home mom who raised six kids, the father of four boys of his own – is Captain America. It’s time to get used to it.
“This is the first time in my career that people are going to go see an Anthony Mackie movie,” he says, describing the slow-motion epiphany. “I get it now, and I didn’t get it before. I now realize who I am is much bigger than what I do.”
For nearly a quarter-century, Mackie has been one of Hollywood’s indispensable glue guys: someone with a quiet confidence and playful demeanor whose name you would find somewhere in the lower third of the movie poster. He was the villain rapper who got verbally castrated by Eminem in “8 Mile” and an Army sergeant succumbing to the pressures of war in Iraq in “The Hurt Locker.” He’s played the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (in HBO’s LBJ movie “All the Way”), Tupac Shakur (the Biggie Smalls biopic “Notorious”) and a police informant named Booty who gets cheese-grated into a fence by Samuel L. Jackson (“The Man”). Before he was an Avenger, he was already a team player.
“He just doesn’t miss,” says Chris Evans, who helped anchor the MCU as Captain America until bowing out in 2019. “He’s like that athlete on the sports team who you know is going to get the job done. You just want him on the squad.”
Jackson writes in an email: “People are finally recognizing his incredible range.” Says director Kathryn Bigelow, who worked with Mackie in “The Hurt Locker” and again in the 2017 crime drama “Detroit”: “I truly believe there is nothing he cannot do with his searing palpable intelligence.”
Mackie debuted as Sam Wilson – a.k.a. the Falcon, a superhero without superpowers – in 2014’s “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” and was informally made the next Captain America at the end of 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame.” His character cemented his new status when he finally donned the stars and stripes at the end of “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” a 2021 Disney Plus series starring him and Stan.
“He comes with this authenticity that he can do almost anything,” says Julius Onah, the director of “Captain America: Brave New World.” “You can put him in Shakespeare. You can put him in ‘Half Nelson,’ playing the drug dealer. And obviously, he has come to life in a really incredible way as Captain America.”
In a universe with few Black heroes, Sam Wilson is now at the centre of a film franchise that has grossed more than $31 billion globally and presumably would like to earn billions more, even after a few box office stumbles and the Marvel fatigue of recent years. But Mackie isn’t the guy fans are used to seeing in that spot. There’s a point in the trailer for the film where Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, the longtime Cap antagonist (and now Red Hulk – yes, Red Hulk) played by Ford, turns to Sam Wilson and says, “You’re not Steve Rogers,” referring to Captain America’s secret identity. It hits in the context of the MCU – and MCU fandom.
“People really want Marvel to work again,” Mackie says. “We miss that golden age of Marvel as an audience, as filmgoers.”
Still, he gets abuse in his DMs from detractors who don’t want him at the centre of Marvel’s change period, much of it ugly and racist: You’re stupid, go away. Black Captain America isn’t my Captain America. Some critics seize on how Mackie has protected his private life, guarding himself from fans and strangers who want documentary proof that they met an Avenger. Mackie noted during a roundtable discussion with the Hollywood Reporter last year that he didn’t want to be part of strangers’ social reality. Unsurprisingly, fans don’t like this, with some posting about his behavior. One person, who explained in a TikTok video last year how Mackie allegedly turned down an encounter at a gas station, called Mackie the “rudest human being alive.” Mackie decided he can’t be bothered.
“I can’t take a picture with you because I don’t know what you’re thinking,” he says. “You have no idea what people’s motives are. People will take you down just so they can get likes on the internet, and your entire career, the 25 years you put in, are gone.”
He laughs and admits that he’s striving for an ideal, one Jackson offered as advice many years ago: Don’t be a motherf—er. He sips his coffee and offers an amendment: “I’ll take a picture with somebody, but I’m going to stand three feet away. And then we can take a picture.”
Captain America’s story begins with the injection of a super-serum. Mackie’s begins with his mother, Martha, rejecting a principal’s suggestion that her rambunctious 7-year-old boy should be on Ritalin. She considered it a slippery slope. A teacher’s idea led him to performing in a puppet show, and “my mom was cool with that since she said the theatre wasn’t a gateway to anything,” Mackie says.
But he needed one more kick out the door – or a fall from a roof.
At a summertime job with his father’s roofing company in New Orleans, Mackie’s brand-new Nikes caught on a shingle and sent the 13-year-old flying to the ground. Willie “Flash” Mackie Sr. checked on his son before letting him have it: I told you not to wear them damn Nikes!
Flash had dropped out of school in eighth grade to work with Mackie’s grandfather. If Mackie didn’t go to college, Flash said, then he was going to end up back there on the roof.
“You’re never going to see me on a f—ing roof again,” he told his father.
When their mother unexpectedly died when he was 15, Mackie’s older brother, Calvin, served some advice that stuck. When you find out you’re behind in the race of life, you have two options: You either quit, or you run faster. Mackie ran faster – all the way to Juilliard.
He was already that team player. Once, when he and his classmates faced the pressure of performing “Up Against the Wind,” a play about Tupac Shakur’s life, at the illustrious New York Theatre Workshop, it was Mackie who eased the tension by rapping “Until the End of Time” to his friends during rehearsal. It was a small gesture, his fellow student Michael Develle Winn remembers, but Mackie made them believe they could do anything he could do.
“Anthony led the group. We still talk about it to this day,” says Winn, now associate artistic director at Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis. “He’s a star now, but he’s also an actor.”
Actor Christopher Walken counts his time with Mackie on Broadway in “A Behanding in Spokane” as “one of the best experiences I’ve had with an actor. I compare being onstage to the trapeze people in the circus, where you let go of the trapeze, and when you do a flip, you want to know there are strong hands on the other side waiting for you,” Walken says. “And Anthony was absolutely that with me.”
To Stan, who admits he never imagined that they “were going to be on this journey together forever,” it’s something else entirely: Mackie is the one he would want with him in a situation where they were nude, and their lives were on the line. “If I was ever on one of those survival shows, like ‘Naked and Afraid,’ he would be the guy that I would probably want to do it with because he would survive,” Stan says.
Survival has meant a work ethic that’s had Mackie appear in more than 60 films since 2002, as well as 25 TV shows and theatre performances on and off Broadway. Despite the steady work, the jobs were mostly supporting roles.
Mackie has previously expressed frustration with not booking more leads. He’s mentioned a particular Hollywood joke: If you’re a White actor who wants an Oscar nomination, then you should play opposite Mackie. Being underappreciated is an emotional topic for Mackie, one that makes him wonder what he’s supposed to tell his four sons about what’s possible for them in life. “The idea of me being overlooked is frustrating in many different ways because I feel like I’ve put in the work,” he says.
Mackie says being offered a corporate superhero gig when he was in his 30s, at a poolside meeting with directors Anthony and Joseph Russo and producer Nate Moore, was the first time he didn’t feel overlooked. Years later, Evans got an advance copy of the script for “Avengers: Endgame” and spilled the ending to Mackie: Steve Rogers giving Cap’s shield to Sam Wilson.
“I was so happy for him,” Evans says, recalling how they celebrated in his basement over a drink. “It was just a really accidental, beautiful moment.”
Evans continues: “Mackie has the goods. You just got to give him a chance.”
The path to Cap wasn’t straight. Mackie was dispirited when he found out that he and Stan were getting a Disney Plus show, and a stand-alone “Captain America” movie wasn’t happening just yet. “I was like, that’s not what we have been doing with all these people before me who had these movies that were huge, monumental points in their careers,” Mackie recalls. “I just thought the show was taking away from the idea that I was in the MCU. I was in the M-Disney-U. It was just another one of those moments where I was like, ‘You need to work harder.’”
He likened his reaction to the meme of Michael Jordan in the Bulls documentary “The Last Dance”: Mackie took it personally. “If I don’t get the movie, you’re telling me I haven’t worked hard enough? I need to go back to the drawing board and figure out why I did not get my movie. Because everybody else got a f—ing movie. And I’m not going to limit myself and say it’s because I’m Black. I’m not going to limit myself and say it’s because I’m a man. I’m not going to limit myself and say it’s because I’m from New Orleans. I’m not going to limit myself and say it’s because I like to fish. No, I didn’t f—ing work hard enough. So, I need to prove to you that I deserve that movie.”
Four years later, Marvel wants to return to cultural hegemon status. It’s brought back its Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr., but he’ll play Doctor Doom in several upcoming films. It needs its marquee heroes. It needs Captain America.
Mackie knows that restoring the franchise’s shine will be a team effort in 2025 – his movie is the first of three MCU films out this year – and that “Brave New World” will set the tone. When I ask why he thinks the recent Marvel movies haven’t soared the way they had in earlier years, he pointed to the scene in “Avengers: Endgame” when Captain America braces to take on Thanos and his army by himself.
“We know this is the end of his life, and he was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. Those consequences were there,” he says. “When we entered the multiverse” – the recent motif of MCU movies – “there were no consequences. If Steve Rogers were to be killed, Dr. Strange could go back 10 minutes, bring him back to life and continue the fight. All the consequences were gone, so no matter what happened, it was like, who cares?”
So what does playing Captain America mean to Mackie right now? The actor has long talked about the relationship between America and Black men, and how much of that history is tumultuous and abusive, but these days he’s stuck to the more universal traits embedded in Captain America – bravery, dignity, honesty. He faced some backlash from U.S. fans recently when he told an Italian audience, “To me, Captain America represents a lot of different things, and I don’t think the term ‘America’ should be one of those representations.” He clarified his remarks on Instagram and said, “I’m a proud American.”
Mackie stresses how much he wants his Cap to be a Black hero who can inspire anyone. “I look forward not so much about what having a Black Captain America means to Black kids, but what having a Black Captain America means to all kids. It might be monumental for some little kid in Des Moines, Iowa, or Amarillo, Texas, to go to the movies and see a Black Captain America because that changes their perspective. The same way that it changed my perspective when I saw Christopher Reeve as Superman or Wesley Snipes up there in ‘Blade,’ chopping, kicking and fighting.”
Mackie is still getting used to strangers calling him Captain America, including the charter boat captain in New Orleans who recently took him on a three-hour fishing trip for free once he figured out who Mackie was. But it wasn’t until he took his sons to see “Sonic the Hedgehog 3” “for the 17th time” that he realized he was finally Captain America to his family. When they saw their father’s face as the main guy on the poster in the movie theatre, his oldest son let him know it was “pretty cool.”
That’s everything he works for, he said. “That’s everything I could have asked for.”
He didn’t say anything, just got four buckets of popcorn, hot dogs and nachos, and joined them to see what happened to Knuckles. Describing the scene, the man at the centre of the movie poster repeats it one more time to me, holding on to the words with care: “That’s pretty cool.”
“Sometimes, you just need to take that moment and say, ‘I f—ing did it!’” Mackie says. “And over the next month, I’m definitely going to take that moment and say, ‘I f—ing did it!’”