‘It had to be addressed’: Anthony Mackie on Captain America and racism

“I think it was something that had to be addressed,” says Anthony Mackie, the 46-year-old actor who is about to be catapulted to a level of fame and scrutiny well beyond anything he has experienced in his near-30-year career as he takes on the role of Captain America on the big screen for the first time.

He’s talking racism, specifically the question of a black man replacing blond-haired, blue-eyed Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) as the linchpin and leader of the Avengers, and effectively of the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe.

“Racism is such a global issue, and it’s not something that’s new,” Mackie says. “It’s been around for thousands of years. The darker humans always got the shorter end of the stick. We see that in Australia, we see that in America, we see it everywhere.”

The new Captain America, Anthony Mackie, may not be quite to MAGA supporters’ liking.Credit: AP

We see it, too, in Captain America: Brave New World – the first movie in which Mackie’s Sam Wilson appears as Cap following the retirement of Rogers at the end of 2019’s Avengers: Endgame – when US President Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford) tells him, “You shouldn’t even be in this position, you’re no Steve Rogers”, before dismissively calling him “son”.

Ouch.

And when we chat at a Disney conference in Singapore a couple of months before the film’s release, Mackie admits he’s already had to deal with a little of it from some superhero fans in the real world, too.

“When I was announced as the possible new Captain America, it was a question of, ‘how can he be Captain America, he’s black’, or ‘how can he be Captain America, they’re just making him that because he’s black’,” he says.

The Falcon was introduced by Marvel Comics in 1969 (Black Panther was the publisher’s first Black superhero, in 1966) and Sam Wilson was anointed Steve Rogers’ replacement as Captain America – the superhero in the Marvel pantheon who most unambiguously represents the idealised notion of America – in the comic books in 2015, so it’s not as if the fans didn’t see it coming. At any rate, given the frequency with which Marvel (and other superhero franchises) recast, reimagine and even revive ostensibly dead superheroes, the idea any single character might be set in stone strikes Mackie as ridiculous.

‘It’s important that someone who looks like me and acts like me gets to play that role and be in these movies.’

Anthony Mackie

“All of these are fictitious characters, none of this is real life,” he says. “You know, Superman can’t fly. When they released Superman, nobody asked the question, ‘How can [that actor] be Superman? He can’t fly.’ No, it’s a movie. You go, you enjoy it. It makes you forget all that stuff – you leave all that shit outside that door and you buy into these characters for being good human beings, and hopefully mimicking the idea of the human being that you are in your day-to-day life.

“I think that’s why it’s important that we make these movies. And it’s important that someone who looks like me and acts like me, with the pedigree that I have, gets to play that role and be in these movies.”

Mackie has been part of the MCU since 2014, when he first appeared as Sam Wilson, aka Falcon, in the second standalone Captain America movie, The Winter Soldier. Unlike most MCU characters, Wilson doesn’t have superpowers – he can fly thanks to high-tech military hardware.

“But I have the ability to be super aware,” Mackie notes of his character. “I have the ability – as a soldier, as a counsellor, as just a good human being – to work my way in and out of situations, as opposed to using brute force.”

He’s been Sam Wilson in six movies so far, typically as a support or ensemble player. But he was the co-lead (alongside Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes) in the spin-off streaming series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021), and it was here that Sam grappled for the first time with the possibility of taking on the role of Captain America, and all it represents.

It was here, too, that we learnt the story of Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), the first, and forgotten, Black Captain America.

In the series, when Wilson turns up at Bradley’s house carrying his new vibranium shield emblazoned with the red white and blue, the older man is scornful. And when Sam asks him why he’s so bitter, Bradley responds, “If you ain’t bitter, you’re blind,” before revealing his complicated backstory.

Chris Evans as Steve Rogers in Captain America: The Winter Solder (2014), the film in which Mackie’s Sam Wilson made his first on-screen appearance.Credit: Marvel

An unwitting subject of a secret medico-military program to develop super-soldiers, Bradley – who plays a major part in the events of the new film, too – was one of many African-American GIs injected with the same super serum used to transform Steve Rogers from weakling to superhero.

Most of them didn’t survive, but Bradley did, and they wanted to study him further, to work out why. But when he threatened to spill the beans on what had been done to him, he was locked up for 30 years. Only when a sympathetic nurse helped him by falsifying his death was he able to slip outside and into a life of quiet anonymity.

“They were worried my story might get out, so they erased me, my history,” Bradley says. “But they’ve been doing that for 500 years ... They will never let a Black man be Captain America. And even if they did, no self-respecting Black man would wanna be.”

By the series’ end, though, he’d come around, at least a little.

“The fight you’re taking on ain’t gonna be easy, Sam,” he said.

“Yeah, I might fail. Shit, I might die,” said Wilson. “But we built this country, bled for it. I’m not gonna let anybody tell me I can’t fight for it. Not after what everybody before me went through, including you.”

The Marvel films and series generally tend to be liberal in their politics, but rarely explicitly so. But in the series and the much-delayed movie, America’s shameful and complicated history is never far from the surface.

Anthony Mackie (left) as the Falcon and Sebastian Stan as the Winter Soldier in a scene from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

In part, that’s because the Captain America movies have always been more anchored in the real world than some of the other MCU strands. Certainly, Brave New World has echoes of the paranoid political conspiracy thriller of the 1970s, albeit with a dash of Red Hulk (the genetically modified alter-ego of Thaddeus Ross, a character originally played by William Hurt) and supervillain Sidewinder (Giancarlo Esposito) to keep the fanboys and girls satisfied.

In part, no doubt, it’s because the director is Nigerian-American Julius Onah, who says he was drawn to the project precisely because it would explore how Sam Wilson made sense of his new identity.

“We’re meeting him at a place where he has to negotiate what that actually means, what course of action he’s going to take, how he’s going to relate to other people, and how he’s going use the power that the platform gives him,” Onah says. “A big part of what he’s going through in this movie is trying to define that in a really specific way.”

And in part, it’s because the film arrives at a particular moment in America’s cultural life when it could hardly not be seen as a political statement of sorts, no matter how much Marvel parent company Disney might try to pretend otherwise.

Mackie didn’t help the “nothing to see here” effort when he spoke onstage at a fan event in Italy last month.

“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 said.

Mackie and Harrison Ford in London for a promotional event last month. Credit: Tim P. Whitby/Getty

Many observers took that to be a thinly veiled jab at real-world President Donald Trump. The reaction was predictably vitriolic from a large proportion of those who responded to it on social media platform X.

The following day, Mackie tried to defuse the situation on Instagram. “Let me be clear about this,” he wrote. “I’m a proud American and taking on the shield of a hero like Cap is the honor of a lifetime. I have the utmost respect for those who serve and have served our country. Cap has universal characteristics that people all over the world can relate to.”

Such is the challenge of trying to be simultaneously specific and universal. Superhero movies are enormously popular with Black and Latinx audiences, but you don’t cross the billion-dollar box-office threshold without also appealing to white audiences. A Black Captain America – especially one with a Hispanic sidekick (Danny Ramirez as Joaquin Torres, aka Falcon) – is a calculated move. Alienating a chunk of Trump-voting America less so.

There’s a lot riding on this film, both for Mackie – who is finally getting his shot at top-line recognition – and for Marvel’s plans to reboot the Avengers franchise.

“The hard part is getting the story right,” says Mackie, who jokes that he wants to be around for at least 10 more outings as Cap (“I’m gonna just show up in random movies,” he says).

“The hard part is taking these characters to the precipice of what they can be in the storyline of what is now Marvel Studios. We’ve created a lane that is the Marvel truth and the Marvel story that people are looking to follow and are interested in. We’ve created that vocabulary, and as long as we stay in that lane … I think it’ll be great.”

Captain America: Brave New World is released in cinemas on February 13.

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