Mackie’s original Marvel audition was for Iron Man 3’s villainous Mandarin. That role went to Ben Kingsley, but his screen test led to a lunch with the company’s creative brokers, including Joe Russo and producer Nate Moore, about starring in Winter Soldier. “He has charisma, but he also has the ability to convey integrity in a way that very few actors can,” says Russo. “And there’s a level of trust between him and the audience.” Still, because of
Marvel’s Vatican-like atmosphere of secrecy, even among its employees, Mackie didn’t discover he was playing Falcon until about two months before production on Winter Soldier began. “Growing up, I’d always loved Falcon, because he was a comic-book hero who was black who didn’t have ‘Black’ in the title,” he says. “He stood on his morals. He stood on who he was.”
Winter Soldier is very much the story of Steve Rogers/Captain America—and a fairly dark one at that. But it’s brightened by the at-ease relationship between its two ex-military heroes. “We wanted to make sure Sam felt like an equal to Steve Rogers both in disposition and in charm,” says Moore. “We knew we’d be sunk if we cast a younger actor, or an actor without weight. But when we sat down with Anthony, the Russo brothers and I realized that here was an incredibly talented, credible actor who would be believable as a former serviceman who would be capable of pulling Steve out of his shell in the modern day.”