Breaking Baz: ‘Captain America’s Anthony Mackie On Bonding With Harrison Ford, ‘Avengers’ Movies To Come & How A Punch On The Nose Drew Blood

Anthony Mackie talks about how he and Harrison Ford bonded over “the weirdest sh*t” shooting Captain America: Brave New World.

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February 11, 2025 5:59pmServices to share this page. Anthony Mackie Baz Bamigboye

EXCLUSIVE: Anthony Mackie lights up a whopper of a cigar, relaxes into his chair and talks about how he and Hollywood legend Harrison Ford bonded over “the weirdest sh*t” while they were shooting Captain America: Brave New World.

Mackie makes his first full Marvel feature as Captain America since he was anointed by Chris Evans in the closing moments of Avengers: Endgame, and after exploring the part further in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier with Sebastian Stan for Disney+.

In the new movie, directed by Julius Onah (Luce) and releasing worldwide Friday, Mackie stars with Ford, who plays Thaddeus Ross, who’s been antagonistic towards the superhero tribe. Now the old warhorse is the U.S. president.

Danny Ramirez (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Top Gun: Maverick) is the new Falcon.

I lean forward eager to know what transpired between the actor now putting the full Mackie stamp on the Marvel idol and the legendary Ford, who hasn’t stalled as a star since his first outing as Han Solo in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope in 1977.

Mackie, the son of a man who ran his own construction company, starts to tell me he’s built a bunch of houses and that he puts new bathrooms into his New Orleans home to relax. ”So, along with going over scripts and stuff, that’s another thing that we bonded on. [Ford] was a carpenter right before he was acting. So we’d always have the weirdest conversations. It was the weirdest sh*t,” he bellows.

One time, Mackie shares, “I was telling him, ‘Oh man, I found this nice cut of wood and I think I’m going to make a tabletop for my pool table so it can double as a dining table. And Harrison goes, ’So what kind of router bits are you using?’ ”

Eventually, Mackie showed Ford photos of his tool shed with his drills and bits. Soon, Ford’s advising him on what type of router he’ll require on Cyprus wood, a hard wood. “And sure enough, when I got home and I started making my tabletop, the router bit I had broke and the one he told me to use was the only one that would work on it.”

Observing Ford over the years, my sense is that if he thinks you’re not full of bullsh*t, then you’re fine. “And that’s the way it seems,” Mackie nods, “for I am sure he has seen all the bullsh*t, but with this it was weird because you had little Danny hopping around everywhere, then you had me, then you had Harrison who‘s the pinnacle of what you can ask for for a career and artistry in this business.

“It was refreshing. That’s the way he described it to me. He was like, ‘Being on this set and working with you guys is kind of like a family. You guys are a unit. That’s refreshing to me.’ After that, it just became easy peasy. Every day he worked, he would come on set and go, ’We’re gonna shoot this piece of sh*t.’ And the crew would be like, ’Yeah, let’s shoot it.’”

The two stars often went out for dinner after a day’s filming. ”We bonded in a way of just two human beings that had similar interests. He’s an outdoor guy. I’m an outdoor guy,” Mackie says.

Mackie was working on getting a pilot license and Ford was invaluable in giving him confidence to proceed “because he has, like 20-something planes.”

Even though Mackie’s Sam Wilson and Ford’s Ross have, as Mackie puts it, “a contemptuous relationship,” there’s a perceptible twinkle in Ford’s eye when he’s opposite Mackie.

They’d actually worked together before, in 2003 on Hollywood Homicide. “I had a small role that got cut down to a smaller role,” Mackie remembers. “I played a guy, a little criminal who got killed, and he played a police officer. So he discovered my body and I was like, ‘Hey, Mr. Ford, it’s so nice to work with you.’ He was like [imitating Ford], ‘Oh, you were the guy in the car? You play a good dead guy.’”

When Ford first arrived on set for Captain America: Brave New World, Mackie went, “‘Yo, we did a movie together.’ He was like, ‘Don’t talk about that movie!’”

On this film, Mackie reflects, “That it was interesting to me how open and giving he was as an actor and as a co-star. He never closed himself off or did the thing of, ‘I’m a big star, so you guys aren’t allowed to be around.’ In Atlanta, they have the little cooling tent for us to get out of the sun and cool down, and they had a tent for him on the other side of the lawn. So he grabbed his chair, picked up his chair, and walked all the way over to us and sat in the tent with all of the rest of the actors and just hung out and shot the sh*t. And he was just like one of the group. He wasn’t Harrison Ford. He was one of the actors in the movie.”

For Mackie, “it was a learning lesson, like a one-on-one lesson on how to run a set as a leading man.”

Ford, says Mackie, was keen on the idea of being in a Marvel movie. “He said he chose this movie and this character because everybody he knew who had been in a Marvel movie said they had fun doing it. And he goes [imitating the Ford growl again], ‘Well, I wanna have fun.’” 

They shot in Atlanta for just over four and a half months. Then with the strike, they were set back with the release of the movie. 

Once the strike was over, they went back for reshoots. The labor dispute gave them time to “really home in on what we needed to work on and what we wanted to fix.”

Mackie reasons “that all these movies get reshoots. It’s standard. If you do a movie of that size it’s going to get reshoots, it’s just is what it is. The great part about it was, the strike gave us time to settle in to the idea of how to make this movie the best it can be.”

Marvel, he tells me, is “really put every resource on the table to make this movie work.”

They start shooting Avengers: Doomsday in March or April; that MCU movie comes out, he says, next summer. “We shoot in London through the summer and then the following summer we shoot the next one [Avengers: Secret Wars]. It’s going to be a full slate.”

RELATED: Upcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe Films: The Multiverse Saga Listed, In Order, Through Phases 5 & 6

He doesn’t yet know how many of the Avengers will reunite for the two blockbusters.

“I don’t know how many are coming back. RDJ [ Robert Downey Jr.] made the big announcement that he’s coming back. Other than him I don’t know who of the original crew will be coming back, but I know he will be. I’m excited to be able to go to work with him, go toe to toe with him. That’s a once-in-a-career experience that’s as amazing as working with Harrison Ford, because he’s a legend,” Mackie says, smiling as he puffs on that big ol’ cigar.

“I’m the OG now. I’m the only guy,” he chuckles. “I’m the Avenger from the old group that brings in the new group. So it’ll be a changing of the guard. As you see in the new trailer, Ross is like, ‘I want you to start up The Avengers.’ So I have to figure out who’s going to be the new Avengers.

“That’s the perk of being Captain America. I get to pick who I want to hang out with,” he says with a satisfied grin.

Simultaneously, Mackie will film an Apple TV+ series 12 12 12 for director Kari Skogland, who directed The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. It’s a cat-and-mouse crime drama with Mackie playing an FBI agent attempting to track down the mastermind behind a big heist. That role will be played by Jamie Dornan, with whom Mackie starred in the movie Synchronic.

When Skogland showed Mackie the 12 12 12 project, he suggested they go after Dornan. “Now, Kari, Jamie and I will be in Budapest this summer and I’ll be going back and forth between Budapest and London.”   

I mention that the scene in final episode of The Falcon and the Winter Solider where his character upbraids U.S. politicians for their attitudes towards immigrants is even more pertinent now than it was when first shown four years ago.

Captain America berates the unbending politicians, telling them: “I’m a Black man carrying the Stars and Stripes. What I don’t understand, every time I put this thing up, I know that millions of people are going to hate me for it…”

Mackie picks up my point, saying he finds it “so interesting with this movie and with Sam Wilson that Captain America represents the good in everyone. That’s the reason why a kid in England, or anywhere, can look at Captain America and say, ‘I want to be Captain America.’”

The actor insists, “He’s the best version of all of us.”

And it was thrilling to see Mackie, in his hometown, give a riveting speech at the Super Bowl. Millions and millions of people saw him do that. And it matters. 

I would argue that not just anyone can effortlessly play these roles in these superhero movies. 

Mackie observes that for him “the character is only as good as the script, and even more so in these movies, because it’s such a heightened aspect of reality.”

Onah, the director, had them rehearse a lot where they put out the scenes in their own words. Also, the emotion of the character was just as important as the physicality of the stunt scenes. As a result, says Mackie, “this movie has a lot of heart, a lot of emotion, a lot of scenes where you see two people dealing with real situations, human situations, just in superhero costumes.”

For example, he cites Captain America: Civil War as being one of his favorite Marvel movies because “the script was so tight.”

He suggests that if you If you go back and watch Avengers: Endgame or Avengers: Infinity War, “you could relate to what Thanos is saying, like literally that his argument makes sense to the regular, average, everyday guy.“

With the new movie, as an executive producer Mackie was given a lot of input and freedom “on what Sam was saying and what he was doing and what that meant to the Marvel Cinematic Universe,” plus he became privy to a chunk of stuff he wasn’t plugged into before.

Mackie began preparing for this moment more than two decades ago. At Juilliard, he worked extensively with the late stage combat and movement teacher Felix Ivanov, and with Moni Yakim, another renowned figure in the art of movement.

Ivanov taught clown movement, circus skills. Mackie studied with him while at high school in New Orleans, then at the North Carolina School of the Arts and again at Juilliard.

How does clowning around link up with playing a superhero, I ask him?

“It’s about physicality. It’s like, if you look at fun, if you’re doing commedia dell’arte or even if you’re doing kabuki, the emotion, the story is being told through movement,” he explains.

Mackie has me throw a punch and he moves his head, giving off the impression that I’ve landed one on him. “Not everybody can throw a punch. Not everybody can look natural in these movements. So you got to have body control and form to be able to move through that. And a lot of that comes with body training and a focused movement. So working with Moni Yakim and Felix Ivanov at Julliard, it was such a great training because it gave us the ability to be comfortable in our body enough to where your movement looks honest instead of rigid.”

Being a Southern gentleman, Mackie won’t name the actress who, in the middle of a fight sequence on another movie, socked him squarely in the face. “They hadn’t had stunt training,” he adds dryly.

“It was a proper punch on my nose,” he adds.

I delicately inquire whether she broke it. “No, but there was blood.”

She hadn’t had the proper training, he laments. “Like in stage combat, we learned what’s called a parrot punch, so you punch the parrot on my shoulder, you don’t punch my face.”

I ask if he ever took ballet lessons because people such as Mick Jagger, for instance, swear by them, for limbering up.

Smiling, he says he took classes at North Carolina, Juilliard and also — get this — at the School of American Ballet with Mikhail Baryshnikov. “We would sneak in to some of the classes, and they would let us take classes with him,” he explains.

Was that part of a plan to sharpen his physicality for acting?

Laughing, he shakes his head. “No, I wanted to meet girls. That was just simple and plain, my man. It was a school full of ballerinas. That was why.”

Mackie says, “They encouraged us at Julliard to take advantage of the experience of being in New York,” he says.

“And they told us to do that because you never know how that would affect your movement and how that would affect you once you got out of school. If you look at Christopher Walken,” he says of the Hollywood star with whom he starred in the 2010 Broadway production of Martin McDonagh’s grisly A Beheading in Spokane, the last time that Mackie appeared on stage.

“Christopher Walken was a chorus boy before he became Chris Walken,” he says.

All that dancin’ around helped give Mackie the tools to play the hero that is Captain America.

To get in shape for Captain America: Brave New World meant three months of physical training, followed by six to eight weeks of choreographed training, although some of the fights in the movie he learned on the day. Mackie praises David Warren, his stunt double, lauding his physical ability as being “second to none.”

“He knows my body so well that when they choreograph the fights, he knows what I can do. Well, he knows what I can’t do well, so he knows I can pretty much do everything except kicks. I’m just awful with kicks,” he confesses.

“He’s always there with me watching me. He gives me more direction than the director when we’re doing those fight scenes,” he adds.

Mackie was introduced into the MCU when he played Sam Wilson in 2018’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but at the time, he says, “I never saw the Marvel Universe without Chris Evans. I mean, Chris Evans was the face, just like Robert Downey Jr. was the face of Marvel. So it was never an idea of, ‘Oh, one day I’m going to grow to be Captain America.’”

Did he think that because he’s Black?

“No, it was never the idea of me being Black that was in question or the hindrance. I’ve worked my entire career being Black,“ he says with a hearty laugh.

“I know, man, when I wake up every day I’m …,” he jokes.

On a more serious note, he adds, ”I’ve never had an issue with being limited because of the color of my skin. And if I came across someone who limited me because of the color of my skin, I disassociated that person from my career.”

When he met Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker, it was about a smaller role. When they met again he pitched her the idea of him playing the thoroughly professional Sgt. J.T. Sanborn, the bomb disposal team leader. “But Sanborn was written for a white dude,” he says.

His argument was that “war doesn’t know race, just like, ‘I have to watch the back of that white dude. The white dude has to watch the back of this Black dude. The enemy don’t care, it’s not like they’re going out picking off all the white dudes around the Black dudes. No, they’re picking ’em all off. So it is about brotherhood as opposed to race.”

Once he pitched that to Bigelow, she got it. “I got cast as Sanborn because she was open-minded enough about the idea to see, ‘Yeah, this isn’t about race.’”

I was in the room when The Hurt Locker won Best Picture and I remember Mackie joining Bigelow, Mark Boal and others on stage, with Mackie whooping like crazy. 

“But all through my career, there’s been roles that were written for white actors that I subsequently was able to do because the director was open-minded about the idea of seeing somebody else in a role,” he says, citing one of his favorite movies, The Shawshank Redemption, with Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins.

“Morgan Freeman’s role was written for a white guy — that’s why his name was Red.

“Like, Tim Robbins asked him, ‘Why did they call you Red?’ He goes, ‘Because I’m Irish.’ That was written for a white dude. And Morgan said, ‘Don’t change nothing. Leave it exactly the way it is. If you don’t believe I’m Irish, that’s a problem with you, not with the script.’”

When Freeman told him that, Mackie went, ”’Holy sh*t, dude!’ That’s the way I want my career to be perceived and looked at. That’s the way I want my roles to be. I want to do great roles, not because they’re Black, but I want to do great roles because they’re great roles.”

Mackie’s had the same team, he says, for two decades, one that includes manager Jason Spire at Inspire Entertainment, Jeremy Barber and Kevin Volchok at UTA, and Alexandra Crotin and Chelsea Thomas at the Lede Company.

The mandate with Mackie and his agent and manager, then and now, is: “If they read something good for one of their other clients that happens to be white, they’ll send it to me and say, ’I want you to read this. If nothing else, it’s a good script …’”

The Falcon is different, Mackie observes, “because it was in the comic book, and with the history of Sam Wilson in the comic book, he was a street hustler from Harlem in the 1960s. That’s a Black dude!” he says with a guffaw that echoes around the London hotel’s courtyard garden.

“Stan Lee told me when I first got the role that he wanted a character that represented Black culture. So at that time, Black exploitation was very big. So he basically wrote his idea of a Black exploitation character like a Shaft or somebody like that. But then as the Black community evolved in America, so did The Falcon to where, once we went through civil rights, once we went through all these different moments in history, The Falcon evolved into the scenic representation of what African-American culture was at that time, to where he became a soldier and a representative of the American Army.”

Mackie’s brother was hugely into comic books when they were growing up in New Orleans. However, the actor tells me he “never read ‘em” because he was deeply into cartoons. “But my brother would read comic books all day, every day.”

Mackie’s favorite cartoon was Thundercats, followed by He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and Tom and Jerry and he says he could watch cartoons all day. “Even now, I make my boys watch Tom and Jerry. I bought all these DVDs. I’m like, ‘Y’all got to watch. You got to know who Tom and Jerry are.’”

Mackie made his stage debut at age 7 in a production of Waltzing Matilda, after the unofficial Australian national anthem. The teacher involved was an Aussie, and he had the second graders create little puppets out of balloons and papier-mâché, and Mackie was Matilda, a guy who lives in the Australian outback. “I was the lead in the play and got a standing ovation. I was like, ‘I want to be an actor, this is great. I want to do puppet plays forever!’”

From fourth grade onwards, Mackie was to enroll in many theater programs. At 14, after much encouragement from drama teachers, he attended the annual Alabama Shakespeare Festival and saw George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House; more importantly, he saw Richard III, his first communion with a work by William Shakespeare.

His eyes light up. “They had these huge cannons on stage and people jumping and swinging off the stage. And I was like, ‘Holy sh*t, this is amazing!” And that’s where the acting bug really took hold.”

He enrolled into a summer session at the North Carolina School of the Arts. Later he did his senior year there, and when he graduated won a place at Juilliard.

Asa kid, he loved watching Don Cheadle in The Golden Girls spinoff The Golden Palace.

“Even though my dad loved Sidney Poitier and I watched all his movies, and there were so many actors we watched that we loved, but for some reason Don Cheadle stuck with me,” he explains.

Many years ago, I remember an evening in New York where a group of us, well refreshed, got into an impromptu battle of the Bard where Mackie and a few other actors exclaimed Shakespeare sonnets and verse from some of his plays. Another time, we did a similar Shakespeare thing in L.A.

“New Orleans is a very segregated city. And the schools I went to were all Black so we didn’t read Shakespeare, we didn’t do plays, we didn’t have stuff like that,” he says. 

When Mackie got into NOCA he was intrigued by the new kids he met there who were reading Ibsen, Chekhov and Shakespeare. And he was struck “by their viewpoint of the world around them.”

His teacher, Ray Vrazel, gave him his first Shakespeare play to read, King Lear, and a book of sonnets.

“When I first read King Lear it blew my mind,” Mackie recalls. He also was fascinated by the character Edmund, who was the bastard child, and by a speech he makes where he bemoans his status but believes he’s as good as any legitimate offspring. 

“And when I read that as a Black man, I thought, ‘This white British dude 500 years ago is writing something I can relate to, and after that, it was over with. I read everything I could, everything. … I would just sit there, it was my Bible.”

He would read the lines, and then write out the plays in his own words to help him understand what Shakespeare was saying.

He began to understand how knowledge of Shakespeare and other classic playwrights can relate to contemporary situations. “And that was the thing, it wasn’t foreign at all,” he exclaims.

“It was mind-blowing to me, like I said, that this dude, so far away and so different, could have the same feelings and expressions and understandings that I had as a little Black kid from New Orleans.”

Those dramatists, he notes, were dealing with issues that we’re still dealing with today. “Not much has changed except cell phones and computers,“ Mackie says.

His dream is to perform a play in the London stage, although not a classic. “I want the opportunity to find a new writer, a new voice, a new opinion on the world, and present that. It’s like there are only so many times you can play Hamlet. I want to do something different and something creative and timely to now,” he declares.

We throw some names around, then look glumly at each other.

“All of the good playwrights are now writing on four Netflix shows and two Apple shows,” he grouses.

“But I’d like to find a young playwright in London, that’s the challenge,” he says.

Let’s hope that he pulls it off.

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