The Falcon and The Winter Soldier Star Describes “Awful” Filming Conditions

Anthony Mackie has described the latest leg of production on Disney+ and Marvel‘s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier as “awful.”

The highly-anticipated Marvel Cinematic Universe spinoff is set to reunite Mackie’s confident hero Falcon and Sebastian Stan’s often-brutal and psychologically damaged Winter Solider, as the pair are forced into a begrudging team-up against foes new and old.

The project had almost finished filming at the start of the year before the depressing events of 2020 delayed its shoot. Now, the pair are back in Prague to film the final scenes on the series, but progress has been naturally slow-going due to the new safety measures that the cast and crew must observe.

“Everybody’s very afraid of each other. The food is bad because they have to pack it up somewhere else and bring it to us in Ziploc bags. Yeah, it’s awful. You’re literally living in quarantine. It’s not like the NBA bubble where they had a barbershop and friends to hang out with,” Mackie told Entertainment Tonight, adding “No, if you get within six feet of somebody, there’s some little Czech dude coming and poking you with a stick saying, ‘You have to move.’ So it’s rough.”

Mackie went on to share a personal memory of late actor Chadwick Boseman, who died earlier this year from complications related to colon cancer. The pair starred alongside each other in Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.

“It’s funny, I have a lot of memories of Chad and I cared about him dearly as a friend,” recalled the actor emotionally. “The first time I met him was in 1998 [when he was directing a play]. My girlfriend at the time brought me into the theater [and] he was in the black box in an office chair spinning around the room. She was like ‘hey, Chad, I want you to meet my classmate at Julliard, Anthony’ and he goes ‘wait, I’m concentrating, don’t break my vibe’ and he just spins around the room, and I was like ‘…it’s nice to meet you, man’ and he was like ‘I’m almost there!'”

Mackie says he brought up their first encounter in a later conversation, but Boseman rebuffed him playfully, saying “I don’t wanna talk about it! I was going through a lot in my young age.”

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier stars Mackie as Sam Wilson/Falcon, Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier, Daniel Brühl as Baron Zemo, Emily VanCamp as Sharon Carter and Wyatt Russell as John Walker/U.S. Agent.

Disney+ has not set a new release date for the series yet, but the streaming service is still eyeing an early-2021 drop.