Anthony Mackie recently sat down in an exclusive interview with Screen Rant to to talk about his character in Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain, and about playing the Falcon in Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
Though Mackie has impressively portrayed a diverse cast of characters over the course of his career, he says that he didn’t feel the need to meet the real Adrian Doorbal, the man he played in Pain & Gain.
“I heard this one story about him that told me everything I needed to know. On the day that he was being sentenced when the jury came back in, they went looking for him and he was in the bathroom having sex with his paralegal. That told me everything I needed to know about this guy.”
Anthony Mackie says that he thinks that this movie will change people’s perceptions of Michael Bay.
“I think what’s going to surprise people most of all is the story-telling. Michael took a very simple, dark story and opened it up and put so many colors and flavors in it. There’s a lot of psychological flip-flopping in this movie. If it was another director, he would be praised for his ability to flesh out these characters.”
In next year’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Mackie will be playing Sam Wilson, the very first African-American superhero to have appeared in mainstream comics. Sam Wilson is more commonly known by his codename “Falcon.” Falcon was created by Stan Lee and Gene Colan to eventually become the partner of Captain America.
After working so hard to increase his own physique for Pain & Gain, Mackie says that he changed his workouts to reflect tone over size since it would be much harder for a big man to fly. He courteously decided to ensure that he didn’t look bigger than Chris Evans, since he felt that would be ” “a huge disservice to him.”
When he was asked about how the filmmakers will visualize Falcon’s powers of telepathy with birds, this was his answer.
“What they do is the Falcon has had two or three incarnations over the life of the character, so they took all three and formed it into one character. They released the photos of my character in his uniform about two weeks ago, so all of that stuff we’re figuring out and we’re going to play into taking down the Winter Soldier.”
Notice that Mackie said nothing about those specific powers. Considering this fact I think it’s likely that he won’t actually feature those powers at overtly. The filmmakers will more likely choose to stay with a more realistic tone that the Marvel movies have kept, and they probably won’t want to use
Anthony Mackie also claimed that the new directors for the Captain America franchise, Joe & Anthony Russo, haven’t necessarily been sticking to their guns and making the movie too funny.
“The Russo brothers are very good as far as putting people in a situation that’s funny and letting them find their way out. But also with this movie, what they’re doing that’s really cool is allowing us to find those dark beats. They’re allowing us to really make those characters real people as opposed to slapstick comedy cartoons.”
This has been a staple of Marvel’s ever since they formed their own studio. They have too much respect for their own characters to reduce them to cheap cardboard characters. It’s good to see that the Russos are honoring that tradition.
Source: Screen Rant
