Anthony Mackie Discusses Taking up Post-Endgame MCU Mantle

This article contains spoilers for Avengers: Endgame

Going into Avengers: Endgame, we assumed that the film would probably be the last we would see of Chris Evans’ Captain America in a central role. Evans had put in his time as the blonde, time-lost hero, and although we hoped to see him pop up again in a later movie in some capacity, it looked like his days of leading the charge were over.

Then, Endgame happened, and Steve Rogers decided to choose love and a long life with Peggy Carter in the past over continuing to fight in the present alongside his friends Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) but he had a surprise in store for them, turning up as an elderly man in the current timeline to pass his iconic shield on to Sam while Bucky looked on from afar – although where and when exactly Steve nabbed that good-as-new version of his shield from is anyone’s guess.

For his part, Mackie is approaching taking up the Captain America mantle going forward very seriously, having previously revealed that he ended up finding out about Marvel’s move from Evans himself.

“We were shooting in Atlanta and Chris Evans had a bunch of us over to his house to watch a football game, because we all hate the Patriots and he loves the Patriots,” Mackie said. “He and I go downstairs and he’s showing me the house and he’s like, ‘So are you excited?’ I’m like, ‘I mean yeah, it’s gonna be a football game. I love football, I watch football every week, but I didn’t know you were this into it.’ And he’s like, ‘No, about the script. You haven’t read the scene?’ I was like, ‘No.’ So he jumps up, runs out of the room and back in with the script and hits me with the script. He’s like ‘Page 85! Read it! Read it!’ And he sits there like a kid watching [me read it].”

And in a new interview with CinemaBlend, the actor has been chatting about how his version of Captain America will be different:

“I love Chris. Chris is an amazing Cap. And I feel like, what he’s been able to do with that character, very few people have been able to do in any cinematic universe or span of films. Because he’s played Cap for a lot of movies. To take that over, to be a part of that, the legacy of that, is a huge challenge. It’s something where a lot of people are going to expect me to be Chris Evans in the same suit, but a black dude. And that’s definitely not gonna happen.”

Marvel has already confirmed that Mackie and Stan will appear together in a Falcon and Winter Soldier limited series on Disney’s upcoming streaming service, Disney+, and we now know that Captain America: Civil War‘s Emily VanCamp (Agent 13) and Daniel Bruhl (Zemo) have joined the cast. How much we’ll see of the transition from Falcon to new Cap in that show remains unknown at this time.