Is Anthony Mackie actually prepared for this?

The Captain America: Brave New World press tour continues, and while they have finally located Danny Ramirez and placed him in front of cameras, how’s the rest of the tour going? Not great, Bob!

Anthony Mackie is profiled in Esquire and the topics range from presumed Oscar snubs to negative fan encounters. I truly feel for Mackie here, he was always going to absorb an unfair amount of sh-t the moment he was named Chris Evans’ successor as Captain America—I had to rage quit life for a bit last night when I came across an online post calling him “DEI Cap”, as if Sam Wilson wasn’t made Captain America in the comics years before anyone gave a sh-t about DEI anything—but Mackie has a record of maybe not always wording things the best in interviews. Once again, was this man not prepared AT ALL to front this global press campaign? 

Mackie says he’s treating his time as Cap as his “Oscar moment” because he feels he has been snubbed four times in his career, saying, “Captain America is my Oscar. Because I’ve been overlooked so many times in my career.” (The four snubs are Brother to Brother, Half Nelson, The Hurt Locker, and The Banker. He has the best argument for being snubbed for The Hurt Locker, for which Jeremy Renner did receive an Oscar nod.) I fully understand what he’s saying here, about feeling he’s getting a level of recognition not always granted to him, but to Cap fans who don’t give a sh-t about Oscars, this is coming across as solipsistic at best.

It is a big career moment, and it sucks so much of it is mired in real world politics. The Captain America movies always skirted the edges of politics, The Winter Soldier is the most political film in the series largely because we found out about programs like PRISM, which allows the government to spy on its citizens, while the film was in production, which lent its plot about an all-seeing, all-knowing government spy shop some real gravitas. But after that film, Marvel and its brain trust steered as hard as they could away from politics, to the point that they undercut Sam Wilson in his first turn as Cap in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. They simply do not want to engage with what it means for a Black man to represent America, especially in this moment.

But that’s not the end of it. The profile also includes an anecdote about a bad fan encounter, which left the fan calling Mackie the “rudest celebrity”. Mackie disputes this, citing a “bad week” that involved someone finding his phone number and filling his voicemail and receiving “AI death threats”—better or worse than regular death threats?—which left him unwilling to engage with someone in person. Understandable. People can be super entitled when they see celebrities in the wild, they often ignore obvious signs of stress and/or disinterest to have their moment. Celebrities can even be super nice about declining to take photos or some such with a person, and that person can still walk away calling them rude. It’s often a no-win situation.

But it’s a no-win situation that happens to Anthony Mackie a LOT. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, he had a rough week and didn’t want to talk to a stranger while getting gas. But there are TONS of stories about Mackie being, er, less than ideal to encounter. And not just online, I’ve personally heard first-hand stories from people who dealt with him in a professional capacity and weren’t enamored of the experience. I’m rooting for him as Cap because I think he has an unfairly uphill battle, but he makes it hard to be on his side, let’s leave it at that. 

He talks a lot about the expectations of being Captain America, about what it means for him to hold the shield, but I have never gotten the sense that Mackie has made any real effort to meet the moment, like I think Chris Evans did. I think Evans got a feel for what it means to people, especially children, to have a Cap they can look up to represented in pop culture, and he shifted into another gear when he did Marvel press. It happened around the time of Captain America: Civil War, you could see a difference in how he conducted himself in interviews and on press tours. Gone were the loosey-goosey days of early Marvel, he was more serious and mature and seemed to have put some thought into his answers about “what it means to be Cap”. (Speaking of Evans, he says he’s “happily retired”, refuting rumors he’ll appear in Avengers: Doomsday, as if anyone believes we won’t see all the OG Avengers back within the next couple of years.)

I’m not saying Anthony Mackie doesn’t care, or that he doesn’t understand the weight of the moment, professionally and culturally. I just am not getting the sense that he PREPARED for it. This press tour is only a week old, and I keep seeing controversial headlines and combative interviews. Yes, there’s a lot of noise surrounding his tenure as Cap, but that is happening outside the bubble. Inside the bubble are the press events and formal interviews that make up this media campaign, and it’s easier to turn down the external noise if the internal noise is low, too. But when it’s all a cacophony, well, it’s harder to ignore it. Anthony Mackie is adding to the cacophony when he needs to be turning it down.

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